What is it about?

In everyday life, we make decisions depending on the situation we're in. But thinking carefully about each situation takes time and mental effort. Our study looks at how people decide when it's worth using that extra effort to tailor their decisions to the current context—and when it's better to rely on simple, faster habits. Building upon rate-distortion theory, we hypothesized that people strike a balance between being accurate and being quick, in a way sensitive to reward rate maximization. Across three experiments, we showed that this account explains how people adjust their decision strategies across seemingly disparate task manipulations, including the time between decisions, whether certain actions are generally better than others, and how many different situations they have to keep in mind.

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Why is it important?

Many past studies have looked at the tradeoff between making fast decisions and making accurate ones, but often in simplified settings. Our study brings this idea closer to real life—where people face one general situation and have many possible actions to choose from. Our work also connects different areas of research that are usually treated separately, like how much people rely on habits versus goal-directed thinking, and how context-dependence influences the time it takes to make a decision. Because our framework is based on general principles of maximizing reward rates, it can help explain a wide range of human behaviors—without needing a different theory for each new situation.

Perspectives

At first glance, our study might seem far removed from everyday life: it involves simple tasks like pressing keys in response to images and an abstract theory of information. But it helps us understand something deeply familiar: how we make decisions based on the situation we're in. When you're choosing what to eat for lunch or when a doctor is making a diagnosis, context plays a crucial role. Our findings lay the groundwork for understanding when people do—or don't—take context into account, which has strong implications for both predicting behavior and helping people make better decisions. Of course, our controlled experiments are just a starting point. To fully capture how this plays out in real-world decisions, we call for future research to test our framework in more natural and complex situations.

Shuze Liu
Harvard University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Time and memory costs jointly determine a speed–accuracy trade-off and set-size effects., Journal of Experimental Psychology General, April 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001760.
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