A person's risk preference can determine significant life outcomes (e.g., in finance or health), which is why people are routinely asked to report their risk preferences in various scientific and applied contexts. Yet, to date, the cognitive underpinnings of this judgment-formation process remain largely unknown. We ran two studies (N = 250, and N = 154 in a retest) implementing the process-tracing method of aspect listing, to unpack people's self-reports using formal cognitive models. Our

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... ses indicate that a cognitive account to modeling self-reported risk preference performs very well, and clearly better than using a set of basic sociodemographic variables as predictors. Specifically, according to the best-performing model people sample idiosyncratic information from memory and sequentially integrate the respective evidence to render a judgment. Furthermore, the retrieved evidence proved to remain substantially stable across time, and changes in "evidence stability" related closely to changes in self-reported risk preference. In sum, our findings corroborate the validity of this measurement approach, by suggesting a cognitive explanation for how people render self-reports of their risk preferences, as well as for the well-documented temporal stability thereof.