Think then act, or act then think? Double-response reaction times shed light on decision dynamics in precrastination.

Abstract

People often try to complete tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort—a phenomenon called precrastination (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Because precrastination is so widespread—as in answering emails too quickly, submitting papers before they have been polished, or, on larger scales, convicting people in the rush to judgment, or even going to war in the rush for revenge—it is important to understand its basis. Building on previous work on this phenomenon, we focused on two plausible accounts of it. According to the behavioral account, there is a desire to act for the sake of acting itself. According to the cognitive account, there is a desire to shorten one’s mental to-do list so cognitive resources can be directed to other things. We invented a new task to distinguish between these hypotheses. Our participants made yes-no decisions under the requirement that they always respond twice per trial. We found that participants took longer for the first choice than the second and rarely changed their minds, even when second response accuracy was emphasized. This outcome went against the behavioral account, which predicted shorter first-response times than second-response times and lower (near chance) first-response accuracies than second-response accuracies. Instead, the data clearly showed that participants did all or most of their decision-making up front. The double-response reaction time task provides a new tool for studying decision dynamics.

Has Anybody Asked How People Changer Their Minds? Precrastination and Its Underlying Basis in Decision-Making

“…This caused some technical the experiment. There existed further limitations, which are further detailed in Think Then Act, or Act Then Think?, a publication currently in press to be published (Rosenbaum et al, 2022). In order to replicate this study in the future, testing a larger pool of participants may be necessary in margin of error in our results.…”

Has Anybody Asked How People Change Their Minds? Pre-crastination and Its Underlying Basis in Decision-Making

“…losing internet connection in the middle of the experiment. There existed further limitations, which are further detailed in Think Then Act, or Act Then Think?, a publication currently in press to be published (Rosenbaum et al, 2022). In order to replicate this study in the future, testing a larger pool of participants may be necessary in validating our findings, as this current study overall had a small sample size (N=89) which may have increased the margin of error in our results.…”

“…The behavioral account describes the phenomenon of acting on impulse and is thus considered idleness aversion: doing something is its own reward (Hsee et al, 2010;Rosenbaum, 2022). Essentially, we define the behavioral basis as "the desire to act upon."…”

Effortfulness of Visual Working Memory: Gauged by Physical Exertion

“…For example, although WM task load (e.g., memory set size) scales with perceived cognitive effort captured by subjective reports and neurophysiological responses (e.g., Kahneman & Beatty, 1966;Kardan et al, 2020), it is unclear whether cognitive effort is converted into a common-scale choice utility in the same way as physical effort (see some discussions in Feghhi & Rosenbaum, 2019). This uncertainty adds to the elusiveness in people s behavioral tendenc to avoid cognitive effort in exchange for physical exertion (Radel, Brisswalter, & Perrey, 2017;Rosenbaum et al, 2014;Rosenbaum, Sturgill, & Feghhi, 2022). In other words, how do people compare the perceived effort of cognitive and physical tasks to render a behavioral preference for one task over another?…”

“…First, as effort discounting is often estimated separately for cognitive and physical tasks, it diverges from the more naturalistic scenario when human observers are often presented with and choose from concurrently available cognitive and physical options (e.g., Rosenbaum et al, 2022). Second, although monetary reward is a powerful tool to estimate the subjective value of perceived effort, it introduces an additional demand for reward processing (Suzuki et al, 2021).…”