How Do We Change Our Mind-Style to Make Faster Decisions?
People lower their decision standards as time passes within a choice, especially when they know some decisions might be impossibly difficult.
Source
Overcoming indecision by changing the decision boundary
What they did
The researchers ran experiments to see if people lower their decision thresholds over time. In one phase, twenty-four participants completed six games where they had to guess whether a moving character would jump up or down based on noisy visual cues. These games featured three types of games (easy, difficult, or mixed), and participants were rewarded for correct choices but had a limited total time to play, creating a speed-accuracy tradeoff. In another phase, the researchers used a faster evidence-foraging task across four experiments to test how changing presentation speeds and delay times affected the decision boundaries.
What they found
The researchers found that participants significantly decreased their decision boundaries over time during mixed-difficulty trials, meaning they lowered their standards as a trial dragged on. Even in easy games where keeping a constant boundary was mathematically optimal, participants still lowered their standards over time. However, this non-optimal behavior was highly sensible because the reward landscape was forgiving, meaning they lost very little potential reward by choosing to decide quickly rather than waiting.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study has several limitations. First, the experiments relied on a small sample of twenty-four participants, which may not represent the broader population. Second, the direct tracking of decision boundaries was done using an explicit sampling paradigm, and it remains unclear if these results apply to rapid, automatic perceptual decisions where information is processed implicitly. Finally, the researchers noted that individual differences in nondecision time (the time to physically press a button) varied, introducing potential measurement error into the mathematical estimates of the decision boundaries.
Key terms
- decision boundary
- The threshold of evidence required by a decision maker before they stop gathering information and commit to a choice.
- speed-accuracy trade-off
- The balance between deciding quickly (which increases error rates) and deciding slowly (which improves accuracy).
- expanded-judgment paradigm
- A task where participants receive discrete pieces of information over time, allowing researchers to track the exact evidence they observe before deciding.
- reward rate
- The average amount of reward earned per unit of time across a sequence of decisions.
- nondecision time
- The physical delay between a person making a cognitive decision and executing their motor response.
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Quiz yourself
How is the concept of a restraining force from Cartwright and Festinger's theory represented in modern sequential sampling models?
Common questions
Why is it optimal to lower your standards over time in mixed-difficulty tasks?
In mixed-difficulty tasks, if a trial is extremely hard, you could wait forever and never get clear evidence. Lowering your standard over time prevents you from getting stuck on an impossible trial, allowing you to move on to easier, more rewarding trials.
Why did participants lower their standards over time even in easy games where they shouldn't?
The math shows that the penalty for deciding too quickly in easy games is very low. Participants likely chose a safer, faster strategy because they didn't lose much reward by doing so, prioritizing speed and comfort over perfect mathematical optimality.
How did the researchers track when a participant actually made their decision?
They used an expanded-judgment task where evidence cues appeared sequentially. They then subtracted each participant's estimated physical motor response time (nondecision time) from their total response time to isolate the exact moment the decision occurred.
Does this behavior happen in everyday rapid choices, like driving?
While the study adapted its tasks to be rapid, the visual cues were still presented discretely. Further research is needed to prove if the same boundary-lowering behavior happens during continuous, automatic everyday tasks where we don't consciously count evidence.
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