The environment matters: Comparing individuals and dyads in their adaptive use of decision strategies
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2013, Vol 8, Issue 3
Abstract
Individuals have been shown to adaptively select decision strategies depending on the environment structure. Two experiments extended this research to the group level. Subjects (N = 240) worked either individually or in two-person groups, or dyads, on a multi-attribute paired-comparison task. They were randomly assigned to two different environments that favored one of two prototypical decision strategies—weighted additive or take-the-best (between-subjects design in Experiment 1 and within-subject design in Experiment 2). Performance measures revealed that both individuals and dyads learned to adapt over time. A higher starting and overall performance rate in the environment in which weighted additive performed best led to the conclusion that weighted additive served as a default strategy. When this default strategy had to be replaced, because the environment structure favored take-the-best, the superior adaptive capacity of dyads became observable in the form of a steeper learning rate. Analyses of nominal dyads indicate that real dyads performed at the level of the best individuals. Fine-grained analyses of information-search data are presented. Results thus point to the strong moderating role of the environment structure when comparing individual with group performance and are discussed within the framework of adaptive strategy selection.
Authors and Affiliations
Juliane E. Kämmer, Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Uwe Czienskowski
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678060
- DOI -
- Views 141
- Downloads 0
The wisdom of crowds: Predicting a weather and climate-related event
Environmental uncertainty is at the core of much of human activity, ranging from daily decisions by individuals to long-term policy planning by governments. Yet, there is little quantitative evidence on the ability of no...
Graphs versus numbers: How information format affects risk aversion in gambling
In lottery gambling, the common phenomenon of risk aversion shows up as preference of the option with the higher win probability, even if a riskier alternative offers a greater expected value. Because riskier choices wou...
Savings, subgoals, and reference points
Decision makers often save money for a specific goal by forgoing discretionary consumption and instead putting the money toward the savings goal. We hypothesized that reference points can be exploited to enhance this typ...
Diagnostic Task Selection for Strategy Classification in Judgment and Decision Making: Theory, Validation, and Implementation in R
One major statistical and methodological challenge in Judgment and Decision Making research is the reliable identification of individual decision strategies by selection of diagnostic tasks, that is, tasks for which pred...
Easy does it: The role of fluency in cue weighting
We propose that people weight fluent, or easy to process, information more heavily than disfluent information when making judgments. Cue fluency was manipulated independent of objective cue validity in three studies, the...