Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany; Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Germany; School of Management, Technical University of Munich, Germany.
Cogn Psychol. 2022 Aug;136:101483. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101483. Epub 2022 May 28.
People deciding between alternatives have at their disposal a toolbox containing both compensatory strategies, which take into account all available attributes of those alternatives, and noncompensatory strategies, which consider only some of the attributes. It is commonly assumed that noncompensatory strategies play only a minor role in decisions from givens, where attribute information is openly presented, because all attributes can be processed automatically "at a glance." Based on a literature review, however, I establish that previous studies on strategy selection in decisions from givens have yielded highly heterogeneous findings, including evidence of widespread use of noncompensatory strategies. Drawing on insights from visual attention research on subitizing, I argue that this heterogeneity might be due to differences across studies in the number of attributes and in whether the same or different symbols are used to represent high/low attribute values across attributes. I tested the impact of these factors in two experiments with decisions from givens in which both the number of attributes shown for each alternative and the coding of attribute values was manipulated. An analysis of participants' strategy use with a Bayesian multimethod approach (taking into account both decisions and response-time patterns) showed that a noncompensatory strategy was more frequently selected in conditions with a higher number of attributes; the type of attribute coding scheme did not affect strategy selection. Using a compensatory strategy in the conditions with eight (vs. four) attributes was associated with rather long response times and a high rate of strategy execution errors. The results suggest that decisions from givens can incur cognitive costs that prohibit reliance on automatic compensatory decision making and that can favor the adaptive selection of a noncompensatory strategy.
人们在选择之间有一个工具包，可以使用补偿策略，这些策略考虑了这些替代方案的所有可用属性，也可以使用非补偿策略，这些策略只考虑一些属性。通常认为，在给定的属性信息公开呈现的情况下，非补偿策略在决策中只起次要作用，因为所有属性都可以自动“一目了然”地处理。然而，根据文献综述，我确定之前关于给定条件下策略选择的研究得出了高度异质的发现，包括非补偿策略广泛使用的证据。借鉴视觉注意力研究对亚计数的见解，我认为这种异质性可能是由于研究之间的属性数量以及是否使用相同或不同的符号来表示属性值的高低在属性之间的差异造成的。我在两个给定条件下的决策实验中测试了这些因素的影响，其中每个替代方案显示的属性数量和属性值的编码都可以进行操作。使用贝叶斯多方法分析（考虑决策和反应时模式）对参与者策略使用的分析表明，在具有更高属性数量的条件下，更频繁地选择非补偿策略；属性编码方案的类型不影响策略选择。在具有八个（与四个）属性的条件下使用补偿策略与相当长的反应时间和高策略执行错误率相关。结果表明，给定条件下的决策可能会产生认知成本，从而禁止依赖自动补偿决策，并有利于自适应选择非补偿策略。
