Consumers can make decisions in as little as a third of a second
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2011, Vol 6, Issue 6
Abstract
We make hundreds of decisions every day, many of them extremely quickly and without much explicit deliberation. This motivates two important open questions: What is the minimum time required to make choices with above chance accuracy? What is the impact of additional decision-making time on choice accuracy? We investigated these questions in four experiments in which subjects made binary food choices using saccadic or manual responses, under either “speed” or “accuracy” instructions. Subjects were able to make above chance decisions in as little as 313 ms, and choose their preferred food item in over 70% of trials at average speeds of 404 ms. Further, slowing down their responses by either asking them explicitly to be confident about their choices, or to respond with hand movements, generated about a 10% increase in accuracy. Together, these results suggest that consumers can make accurate every-day choices, akin to those made in a grocery store, at significantly faster speeds than previously reported.
Authors and Affiliations
Milica Milosavljevic, Christof Koch and Antonio Rangel
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677832
- DOI -
- Views 118
- Downloads 0
Cognition in the woods: Biases in probability judgments by search and rescue planners
A type of emergency decision-making which has not received research attention is the police search for a lost person in a rural or wilderness area. For many such incidents, decisions concerning where to search for the lo...
Enlarging the market yet decreasing the profit: An experimental study of competitive behavior when investment affects the prize
In many competitive situations, our investments increase our gains: Developing better products or research proposals may lead to higher contracts or patents or larger grants. Does increasing investment in such cases alwa...
What might judgment and decision making research be like if we took a Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing?
Judgment and decision making research overwhelmingly uses null hypothesis significance testing as the basis for statistical inference. This article examines an alternative, Bayesian approach which emphasizes the choice b...
The skill element in decision making under uncertainty: Control or competence?
Many natural decisions contain an element of skill. Modern conceptions of the skill component include control (Goodie, 2003) and competence (Heath & Tversky, 1991). The control hypothesis states that a task's skill compo...
Disentangling the effects of alternation rate and maximum run length on judgments of randomness
Binary sequences are characterized by various features. Two of these characteristics—alternation rate and run length—have repeatedly been shown to influence judgments of randomness. The two characteristics, however, have...