Cohen Doron, Teodorescu Kinneret
Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.
Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa, Israel.
Front Psychol. 2021 Nov 12;12:725690. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.725690. eCollection 2021.
Insufficient exploration of one's surroundings is at the root of many real-life problems, as demonstrated by many famous biases (e.g., the status quo bias, learned helplessness). The current work focuses on the emergence of this phenomenon at the strategy level: the tendency to under-explore the set of available choice strategies. We demonstrate that insufficient exploration of strategies can also manifest as excessive exploration between options. In such cases, interventions aimed at improving choices by reducing the costs of exploration of options are likely to fail. In Study 1, participants faced an exploration task that implies an infinite number of choice strategies and a small sub-set of (near) optimal solutions. We manipulated the amount of practice participants underwent during the first, shorter game and compared their performance in a second, longer game with an identical payoff structure. Our results show that regardless of the amount of practice, participants in all experimental groups tended to under-explore the strategy space and relied on a specific strategy that implied over-exploration of the option space. That is, under-exploration of strategies was manifested as over-exploration of options. In Study 2, we added a constraint that, on a subset of practice trials, forced participants to exploit familiar options. This manipulation almost doubled the per-trial average outcome on the comparable longer second game. This suggests that forcing participants to experience the effects of different (underexplored) strategy components during practice can greatly increase the chance they make better choices later on.
对周围环境探索不足是许多现实生活问题的根源，许多著名的偏差（如现状偏差、习得性无助）都证明了这一点。当前的研究聚焦于这一现象在策略层面的出现：即对可用选择策略集探索不足的倾向。我们证明，对策略的探索不足也可能表现为在选项之间过度探索。在这种情况下，旨在通过降低选项探索成本来改善选择的干预措施很可能会失败。在研究1中，参与者面临一项探索任务，该任务意味着有无数种选择策略以及一小部分（接近）最优解决方案。我们操纵了参与者在第一个较短游戏中进行练习的量，并将他们在第二个较长游戏中的表现进行比较，这两个游戏的收益结构相同。我们的结果表明，无论练习量如何，所有实验组的参与者都倾向于对策略空间探索不足，并依赖于一种特定策略，该策略意味着对选项空间的过度探索。也就是说，对策略的探索不足表现为对选项的过度探索。在研究2中，我们添加了一个限制条件，即在一部分练习试验中，迫使参与者利用熟悉的选项。这种操纵使可比的较长第二个游戏中每次试验的平均结果几乎翻倍。这表明，在练习过程中迫使参与者体验不同（探索不足）策略成分的效果，可以大大增加他们日后做出更好选择的机会。
