Multiple-reason decision making based on automatic processing

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. The authors argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 34; no. 5; p. 1055
Main Authors: Glöckner, Andreas, Betsch, Tilmann
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 01.09.2008
Subjects:
Attention
Automatism - psychology
Choice Behavior
Cues
Culture
Decision Making
Female
Humans
Intuition
Judgment
Male
Probability Learning
Problem Solving
Reaction Time
ISSN:0278-7393
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. The authors argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information search imposed by the commonly used experimental tool Mouselab (J. W. Payne, J. R. Bettman, & E. J. Johnson, 1988). The authors tested this assumption in 3 experiments. In the 1st experiment, information was openly presented, whereas in the 2nd experiment, the standard Mouselab program was used under different time limits. The results indicate that individuals are able to compute weighted additive decision strategies extremely quickly if information search is not restricted by the experimental procedure. In a 3rd experiment, these results were replicated using more complex decision tasks, and the major alternative explanations that individuals use more complex heuristics or that they merely encode the constellation of cues were ruled out. In sum, the findings challenge the fundaments of bounded rationality and highlight the importance of automatic processes in decision making.
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ISSN:0278-7393
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.34.5.1055