Some Metatheoretical Reflections on Adaptive Decision Making and the Strategy Selection Problem

Abstract

Organisms must be capable of adapting to environmental task demands. Which cognitive processes best model the ways in which adaptation is achieved? People can behave adaptively, so many frameworks assume, because they can draw from a repertoire of decision strategies, with each strategy particularly fitting to certain environmental demands. In contrast to that multi‐mechanism assumption, competing approaches posit a single decision mechanism. The juxtaposition of such single‐mechanism and multi‐mechanism approaches has fuelled not only much theory‐building, empirical research, and methodological developments, but also many controversies. This special issue on “Strategy Selection: A Theoretical and Methodological Challenge” sheds a spotlight on those developments. The contribution of this introductory article is twofold. First, we offer a documentation of the controversy, including an outline of competing approaches. Second, this special issue and this introductory article represent adversarial collaborations among the three of us: we have modeled adaptive decision making in different ways in the past. Together, we now work on resolving the controversy and point to five guiding principles that might help to improve our models for predicting adaptive behavior. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The complementary role of affect-based and cognitive heuristics to make decisions under conditions of ambivalence and complexity

“…Put differently, if all models are able to discriminate a high percentage of decisions, the individuals may develop some preference for "how to choose" instead of changing the choice algorithm to fit the decision environment. This is consistent with theories of adaptive decision behavior [ 1 ] [ 2 ]. Second, we checked model redundancy; that is, the correlation of choice predictions among the algorithms.…”

“…In its rational aspiration, western culture has promoted the education of reason to dominate emotion but research has shown that such a dynamic is hard to sustain. From the cognitive perspective, it is currently accepted that human beings are able to adjust the depth and extent of their reasoning process according to tasks and situational demands [ 1 ] (See a recent review and reflection on adaptive decision making and strategy selection in [ 2 ]. In particular, the studies of boundedly rational decision algorithms, better known as fast and frugal heuristics [ 3 ] [ 4 ], have operationalized the notion of ecological rationality through simple decision algorithms that operate as a toolbox for decision makers.…”

“…Such algorithms are selected, mostly unconsciously, depending on how well they fit certain types of environments. Others have stressed that adaptation may also be achieved through a single-mechanism decision model that is used for all decisions but has certain components, such as decision boundaries and free parameters, that allow adaptation [ 2 ].…”

“…The few works that address affective processing in choice are very contextual, such as choosing political candidates [ 22 ] and risk attitudes [ 13 ]. To develop a more general account of affective processing in choice, following theories on dual systems of thought, bounded rationality and reliance on affect to form judgments, we align our methods to previous research on choice strategies and algorithms [ 23 ] strategy selection [ 2 ], and to studies on how bounded rationality is operationalized through fast and frugal heuristics [ 3 ] [ 24 ], which are very detailed in terms of how information is processed. In short, this paper helps us understand how humans solve the ambivalence between affective and deliberate processing [ 14 ] within the bounded rationality perspective, and shed new light on the conditions under which people rely on affective responses to make decisions.…”

On the human inability to process inverse variables in intuitive judgments: different cognitive processes leading to the time loss bias

“…There is a large literature on heuristics and rules in decision making (Bettman et al, 1990;Brandstätter et al, 2006;Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009;Gigerenzer, 2008;Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011;Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999a, 1999bMarewski et al, 2018Marewski et al, , 1993Maule, 1989;Price et al, 2013;Rieskamp & Hoffrage, 2008;Svenson, 1979Svenson, , 1998. Stanovich and West (2000), summarised a number of studies and suggested that biases in human cognition can depend on (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experimenter and (4) a different interpretation of the task by the participant than intended by the researcher.…”