Jarvstad, A. and Hahn, Ulrike and Rushton, S.K. and Warren, P.A. (2013) Perceptuo-motor, cognitive, and description-based decision-making seem equally good. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (40), pp. 16271-16276. ISSN 0027-8424.
Abstract
Classical studies suggest that high-level cognitive decisions (e.g., choosing between financial options) are suboptimal. In contrast, low-level decisions (e.g., choosing where to put your feet on a rocky ridge) appear near-optimal: the perception–cognition gap. Moreover, in classical tasks, people appear to put too much weight on unlikely events. In contrast, when people can learn through experience, they appear to put too little weight on unlikely events: the description–experience gap. We eliminated confounding factors and, contrary to what is commonly believed, found results suggesting that (i) the perception–cognition gap is illusory and due to differences in the way performance is assessed; (ii) the description–experience gap arises from the assumption that objective probabilities match subjective ones; (iii) people’s ability to make decisions is better than the classical literature suggests; and (iv) differences between decision-makers are more important for predicting peoples’ choices than differences between choice tasks.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Birkbeck Knowledge Lab |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Feb 2014 14:35 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:09 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/9224 |
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