Why Do Some Decisions Feel Easier Than Others?

Psychologists investigate why people are naturally better at making important decisions.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | March 27, 2022

A new study published in PNAS explores how, contrary to popular belief, it is much easier to make a choice between two high-value options than two low-value options.

Researchers Ian Krajbich, Blair R. K. Shevlin, Stephanie M. Smith and Jan Hausfeld tell us why:

Neuroeconomics and decision psychology seem like very interesting fields of research, could you give our readers a brief overview of both?

Decision psychology, more commonly known as Judgment and Decision Making (JDM), and closely related to Behavioral Economics, tries to understand the thought processes behind how individuals make decisions. These decisions are typically subjective; that is, they depend on individuals' preferences. We try to understand how social, emotional, and cognitive factors influence the choice process.

For instance, your choice of what to order for dinner at a restaurant might depend on how others at the table might judge you, the mood you're in, or your ability to remember all the details of the specials. We also build and evaluate models of the choice process, which range from simple rules (e.g., pick the cheapest option) to exhaustive evaluations and comparisons of all the available options.

Neuroeconomics, sometimes called Decision Neuroscience, takes Decision Psychology a step further. It attempts to directly measure the purported social, emotional, or cognitive processes during decision-making.

For example, rather than simply assuming that attention plays a role in selecting items off a menu, we can use eye-tracking to measure what people actually look at and how that corresponds to what they choose. Or, rather than assuming that people derive pleasure from helping others, we can measure activity in the brain's reward network during prosocial acts. We also build and evaluate models that are inspired by or try to account for these neurological or biological measures.

The abstract of your research suggests that high-value decision-making is a well-explored topic. What made you delve into it and pick your particular hypothesis?

As is often the case in science, we were at the right place at the right time. There has been a lot of recent interest in taking what we know about how the brain perceives things and applying it to how the brain values things.

One prediction, based on what we know about human perception, is that people will find it more difficult to distinguish between high-value options than between low-value options. The logic goes that just as it is easier to distinguish between a 5 lb and 6 lb weight than a 25 lb and 26 lb weight, it should be easier to distinguish between a $5 and $6 product than a $25 and $26 product.

It is trickier to test this hypothesis than you would think because there's no direct way to measure subjective "difficulty." However, there have also been many recent advances in how to measure difficulty from a combination of decision accuracy and decision-time data.

To give you the basic idea, if people make Decision A both faster and more accurately than they make Decision B, then we can say that Decision A is easier than Decision B. We realized that we could leverage this approach to test if people find high-value decisions more difficult.

Could you illustrate for us how a person approaches making a high-value decision, according to your study?

Contrary to our expectations, we found that people find high-value decisions less difficult. In other words, people are faster and more accurate for high-value decisions than for low-value decisions.

We think it may be that people are more motivated to get high-value decisions right, even though in our experiments the benefit from making the correct decision was the same for high- and low-value decisions.

Why do we think this? Well, when we told our participants that they were about to face a series of high-value decisions, they slowed down to compare the options more carefully. Another possible reason that people are better at high-value decisions is that the mere presence of high-value options increases alertness and helps people compare them more efficiently.

What methodology did you adopt for your study? What was your most important takeaway?

We wanted to ensure that our results were about value-based decisions in general and not just one specific kind of decision. So, we had research participants make choices between snack foods, abstract art, and multi-colored blocks where different colors paid different cash rewards.

These were all consequential decisions; participants received food to eat, wearable art, or cash, depending on their choices. In the food and art experiments, we had participants separately tell us how much they liked various snack foods and art pieces. In the colored-block experiment, each block had a cash value, making it easy to tell if participants were making the right choice.

The most important takeaway is that across these different types of choices, people were consistently faster and more accurate when choosing between highly attractive options than between less attractive options, even though the benefit of making the correct choice was the same in both cases.

The importance of 'value' as a concept comes up often in your research. Within the purview of your study, what constitutes value?

Value is a quantity that we assign to things based on preference. If someone prefers A to B, we say that A has a higher value than B. Depending on their discipline, researchers might instead use "subjective value", "utility" or other terms. This is to distinguish it from economic value (i.e., monetary amounts), which can be different.

For instance, a screwdriver may be worth more than a slice of pizza, but I'll take the pizza every time. In our experiments, value arises in different ways. In the first experiment, value is based on how much the person would like to eat each food item. In the second experiment, value is based on how attractive the person finds each image. In the third experiment, value is the same as economic value, i.e., cash.

The challenge in this line of research is that we don't have a great way to measure value. If you want to measure distance, you use a yardstick. If you want to measure weight, you use a scale. But if you want to measure subjective value, what do you do? There isn't a yardstick for value. So, you either need to rely on self-reported values, which is what we did with the food and art, or force subjective value to be the same as economic value, which is what we did with the colored blocks.

One hope for neuroeconomics is that we might one day have that value yardstick, for instance, based on activity in the reward network of the brain.

What can a layperson take away from your research?

We should be wary of placing too much emphasis on decisions between high-value options compared to decisions between low-value options.

Our research indicates that people are more motivated to tackle decisions between high-value options, even when decisions between low-value options are just as important to get right. Most of the decisions we make are between low-value options; high-value options are rare.

So, perhaps we should try to become better experts on the frequent low-value decisions we face and worry less about the occasional high-value decisions that we encounter.

One inference that can be made from your research is that peoples' decision-making is affected by the way options might be presented to them. Would you agree?

There is a lot of research in decision psychology and neuroeconomics on that. These are called framing or context effects.

For instance, when presented with the choice between gaining $50 for sure or flipping a coin to gain either $0 or $100, most people will take the $50. But when presented with $100 and then given the choice between losing $50 for sure or flipping a coin to lose either $0 or $100, most people will take the gamble. This is shocking, because the final outcomes are the same in both cases; you end up with $50 or a coin flip between $0 and $100.

In our study, we did not directly investigate these kinds of framing effects. However, they were almost surely at work behind the scenes. What we considered "high" and "low" value was all within the context of our experiments. In our study, candy bars might have been high value relative to granola bars, but had we included pizza or buffalo wings, those would have been higher in value still, making the candy bars only medium value. There is indeed evidence that our brain's reward system adapts to the range of values that we are likely to encounter.

For example, an iPhone should appear more valuable in a phone shop than in an Apple store.

Do you have plans for follow-up research? Where would you like to see research on this topic go in the future?

We do have ongoing follow-up experiments. We are trying to better understand why people are better at these high-value decisions. One goal is to see whether the mere presence of high-value options makes people better, or whether it is important that they can receive those high-value options.

We are also exploring whether people are similarly discerning between highly-aversive options, such as when people can lose large or small amounts of money. In the spirit of neuroeconomics, we're also thinking about ways to physiologically measure things like attention and alertness, which we think might be contributing to better performance with high-value options.