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Historically, judgement and decision-making research has been dominated by normative and descriptive behavioural theories which assumed that people have stable and consistent preferences, informed by computational processing (e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Tversky & Kahneman, 1992; von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1947). These assumptions have been challenged by contemporary research, which has revealed that people’s preferences are constructed ‘on the fly’ (e.g., Kusev et al., 2020) using a variety of psychological mechanisms which are contingent on features of the context and task (e.g., Brandstätter et al., 2006; Gigerenzer et al., 1999; Kusev et al., 2020; Payne, Bettman, Coupey & Johnson, 1992; Pedroni et al., 2017; Slovic, 1995; Stewart et al., 2006). For instance, in their Decision by Sampling (DbS) relative rank model, Stewart et al. (2006) argued that people’s decisions among and about choice options are represented by their relative rank within a single attribute, not absolute values. Indeed, Ungemach et al. (2011) provided experimental support for DbS predictions by revealing that participants’ preference for safe and risky gambles were influenced by monetary amounts which were sampled from recent memory. However, in this thesis I argue that Ungemach and colleagues used gambles with negligible and non-desirable prizes, which did not trigger participants’ risk preferences, and prompted sampling from experience. Accordingly, in Experiments 1 and 2, I demonstrated that participants’ preferences for risky gambles are influenced by the desirability of gambles’ prizes (i.e., absolute values). Moreover, in the remaining …