Motivation, Brain and Behavior lab, Paris Brain Institute (ICM); Sorbonne Université; Inserm U1127; CNRS U7225, Paris, France.
Elife. 2022 Aug 5;11:e61712. doi: 10.7554/eLife.61712.
To decide whether a course of action is worth pursuing, individuals typically weigh its expected costs and benefits. Optimal decision-making relies upon accurate effort cost anticipation, which is generally assumed to be performed independently from goal valuation. In two experiments (n = 46), we challenged this independence principle of standard decision theory. We presented participants with a series of treadmill routes randomly associated to monetary rewards and collected both 'accept' versus 'decline' decisions and subjective estimates of energetic cost. Behavioural results show that higher monetary prospects led participants to provide higher cost estimates, although reward was independent from effort in our design. Among candidate cognitive explanations, they support a model in which prospective cost assessment is biased by the output of an automatic computation adjusting effort expenditure to goal value. This decision bias might lead people to abandon the pursuit of valuable goals that are in fact not so costly to achieve.
为了确定一个行动方案是否值得追求，个体通常会权衡其预期成本和收益。最优决策依赖于准确的努力成本预期，而这通常被认为是独立于目标评估进行的。在两个实验中（n = 46），我们对标准决策理论的这一独立性原则提出了挑战。我们向参与者展示了一系列与金钱奖励随机相关的跑步机路线，并收集了“接受”与“拒绝”的决定以及对能量成本的主观估计。行为结果表明，更高的货币前景导致参与者提供更高的成本估计，尽管在我们的设计中，奖励与努力是独立的。在候选认知解释中，它们支持这样一种模型，即预期成本评估受到自动计算的输出的影响，该计算将努力支出调整为目标值。这种决策偏差可能导致人们放弃追求有价值的目标，而实际上这些目标实现起来并没有那么昂贵。
