Leng Xiamin, Frömer Romy, Summe Thomas, Shenhav Amitai
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Carney Institute for Brain Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2025 Mar;9(3):521-533. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-02064-7. Epub 2024 Dec 20.
Decisions form a central bottleneck to most tasks, one that people often experience as costly. Previous work proposes mitigating those costs by lowering one's threshold for deciding. Here we test an alternative solution, one that targets the basis of most choice costs: the idea that choosing one option sacrifices others (mutual exclusivity). Across 6 studies (N = 565), we test whether this tension can be relieved by framing choices as inclusive (allowing selection of more than 1 option, as in buffets). We find that inclusivity makes choices more efficient by selectively reducing competition between potential responses as participants accumulate information for each of their options. Inclusivity also made participants feel less conflicted, especially when they could not decide which good option to keep or which bad option to get rid of. These inclusivity benefits were also distinguishable from the effects of manipulating decision threshold (increased urgency), which improved choices but not experiences thereof.
决策构成了大多数任务的核心瓶颈，人们常常觉得决策成本高昂。先前的研究提出，通过降低个人的决策门槛来减轻这些成本。在这里，我们测试一种替代解决方案，该方案针对大多数选择成本的根源：选择一个选项就意味着牺牲其他选项（互斥性）这一观念。在6项研究（N = 565）中，我们测试了将选择构建为包容性的（允许选择多个选项，如自助餐那样）是否可以缓解这种冲突。我们发现，包容性通过在参与者为每个选项积累信息时选择性地减少潜在反应之间的竞争，从而使选择更有效率。包容性还让参与者感觉冲突更少，尤其是当他们无法决定保留哪个好选项或舍弃哪个坏选项时。这些包容性带来的益处也与操纵决策门槛（增加紧迫感）的效果不同，后者改善了选择，但并未改善选择时的体验。
