The role of framing, agency and uncertainty in a focus-divide dilemma.

ABSTRACT: How to prioritise multiple objectives is a common dilemma of daily life. A simple and effective decision rule is to focus resources when the tasks are difficult, and divide when tasks are easy. Nonetheless, in experimental paradigms of this dilemma, participants make highly variable and suboptimal strategic decisions when asked to allocate resources to two competing goals that vary in difficulty. We developed a new version in which participants had to choose where to park a fire truck between houses of varying distances apart. Unlike in the previous versions of the dilemma, participants approached the optimal strategy in this task. Three key differences between the fire truck version and previous versions of the task were investigated: (1) Framing (whether the objectives are familiar or ab

SUBMITTER: Claydon J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11021327 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature