What does it mean to maximize? “Decision difficulty,” indecisiveness, and the jingle-jangle fallacies in the measurement of maximizing
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2020, Vol 15, Issue 1
Abstract
For two decades, researchers have investigated the correlates and consequences of individual differences in maximizing, the tendency to pursue the goal of making the best possible choice by extensively seeking out and comparing alternatives. In this time, many different conceptualizations of maximizing have been proposed, including several that incorporate a construct called “decision difficulty.” We propose that including decision difficulty in measures of maximizing is problematic because the tendency to experience difficulty when making decisions is a separate individual difference construct already studied independently of maximizing — namely, indecisiveness. Across two studies (total N = 639), we find that scales measuring decision difficulty and indecisiveness are strongly correlated (r’s ≥ .85), load on the same component in a principal component analysis, and show a very similar pattern of correlations with related variables. Moreover, decision difficulty and indecisiveness scales both show a divergent pattern of correlations when compared to measures of maximizing. We argue that decision difficulty scales are best interpreted as tapping the same underlying tendency as indecisiveness scales, and conclude that the tendency to experience difficulty in decision making is best conceptualized not as a component of maximizing, but rather a cause or consequence of it.
Authors and Affiliations
Nathan N. Cheek and Jacob Goebel
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678456
- DOI -
- Views 192
- Downloads 0
Who throws good money after bad? Action vs. state orientation moderates the sunk cost fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. We studied how people’s chronic orientation to cope with failing projects (i.e., action vs. state...
Dissecting the risky-choice framing effect: Numeracy as an individual-difference factor in weighting risky and riskless options
Using five variants of the Asian Disease Problem, we dissected the risky-choice framing effect by requiring each participant to provide preference ratings for the full decision problem and also to provide attractiveness...
The boundary effect: Perceived post hoc accuracy of prediction intervals
Predictions of magnitudes (costs, durations, environmental events) are often given as uncertainty intervals (ranges). When are such forecasts judged to be correct? We report results of four experiments showing that forec...
Reference dependence, cooperation, and coordination in games
The problems of how self-interested players can cooperate despite incentives to defect, and how players can coordinate despite the presence of multiple equilibria, are among the oldest and most fundamental in game theory...
How the public, and scientists, perceive advancement of knowledge from conflicting study results
Science often advances through disagreement among scientists and the studies they produce. For members of the public, however, conflicting results from scientific studies may trigger a sense of uncertainty that in turn l...