How choice ecology influences search in decisions from experience

Abstract

a b s t r a c tResearch into human decision-making has often sidestepped the question of search despite its importance across a wide range of domains such as search for food, mates, allies, visual targets or information. Recently, research on decisions from experience has made progress in finding out how individual characteristics shape search for information. Surprisingly little is known, however, about how the properties of the choice ecology shape people's search. To fill this void, we analyzed how two key ecological properties influence search effort: domain of choice (gains vs. losses) and experienced variance (variance vs. no variance). Many people search longer when facing the prospect of losses relative to gains. Moreover, most people search more in options in which they experience variance relative to options they experience as invariant. We conclude that two factors that have been identified as important determinants of choice also influence search of information.Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. IntroductionFor Herbert Simon, one of the most influential economists and cognitive scientists of the second half of the 20th century, search was perhaps the key cognitive process of human life. For instance, in his work with Allen Newell, he conceptualized problem-solving as search for a path through a problem space with the goal of finding a route linking the problem's initial state to the goal state via intermediate steps and subgoals (Newell & Simon, 1972). Search also figures prominently in his notion of ''satisficing'' (Simon, 1956(Simon, , 1990. Satisficing is a method one can recruit when choosing from a set of alternatives (e.g., job candidates, mates) that one encounters sequentially and when little is known about the possible alternatives further down the road. Satisficing means that the decision maker sets an aspiration level and terminates sequential search for alternatives as soon as one is found whose value exceeds the aspiration level. Finally, in a grand metaphor of human life, Simon (1996) depicted our existence as search through a ''life's maze'' (p. 166), representing a multiplicity of needs and wants, and the need to ''survive without drawing upon superhuman powers of intelligence and computation'' (p. 175).Notwithstanding the importance of search as a behavioral and cognitive process across a wide range of domains-foraging for food, visual search for targets, memory search in recall and recognition tasks, the search for information on the web, and the search for mates in social environments (Todd, Hills, & Robbins, 2012)-research on behavioral decision-making (e.g., research on inductive and logical reasoning) and cognition (e.g., research on moral reasoning) has often sidestepped questions of search by using tasks in which summary information is conveniently displayed before the respondents. Past research on risky choice exemplifies this methodological proclivity. Decision researchers, using choice between monetary 0010-0277/$ -see front matter Ó

Fear shapes information acquisition in decisions from experience

“…4A), participants in the ''fearful'' condition sampled substantially more than did participants in the ''happy'' condition, namely 45 times (95% HDI [36,55] This result was corroborated in a mixed-effects linear regression model (random effects over participants) with sample size as dependent variable and condition and position of the decision problem (in the random sequence of the nine problems) as independent fixed effects. We included the position of the decision problem in the model to account for potential sequence effects (e.g., decreasing sample sizes across the experiment due to fatigue, boredom, or learning; see Lejarraga et al, 2012). Inclusion of this independent effect did not affect the other conclusions.…”

“…Additionally, researchers have examined the properties of the choice ecology (e.g., magnitude of incentives, loss versus gain domain, short-versus long-run frame; Hau et al, 2008;Lejarraga, Hertwig, & Gonzalez, 2012;Wulff, Hills, & Hertwig, submitted for publication) and the interaction of ecology and cognition (e.g., amplification effect; . While substantial progress has been made in describing how cognitive and ecological properties shape search and exploration in decisions from experience, there are still blind spots.…”

Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

“…Example statements are "Hurting a defenseless animal is one of the worst things one can do," with "it's always bad" and "it's sometimes bad" as alternatives, and "It is important to be a team player, even if that means censoring oneself at times," with "team goes first" and "I go first" as alternatives (Table S2). Alternatives were constructed so that the exact content in one alternative would be difficult to predict from only viewing one alternative, because variation has been shown to facilitate explorative behavior in other domains (54). In addition, for variation participants also responded to 35 filler items, simple true/false decisions based on previous work (29).…”

Unpacking buyer-seller differences in valuation from experience: A cognitive modeling approach

“…If, as proposed by Yechiam and Hochman (2013a), sellers pay more attention to the task than buyers do, they may differ in the learning process-a possibility that has not been tested previously. The sampling paradigm-and decisions from experience in general-are increasingly employed to examine risky choice, in particular because it lays open the underlying search and learning processes (e.g., Newell & Camilleri, 2011;Hertwig, 2015;Hills & Hertwig, 2010;Lejarraga, Hertwig, & Gonzalez, 2012;Rakow, Demes, & Newell, 2008;Rakow & Newell, 2010). Decisions from experience are also increasingly being used to study pricing decisions for individual objects (e.g., Ashby & Rakow, 2014;Golan & Ert, 2015).…”