{"pk":28816,"title":"What’s in the Adaptive Toolbox and How Do People Choose From It? RationalModels of Strategy Selection in Risky Choice","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Although process data indicate that people often rely on sim-plifying processes when choosing between risky options, cur-rent models of heuristics cannot predict people’s choices veryaccurately. To address this apparent paradox, it has been pro-posed that people might adaptively choose from a toolboxof simple strategies. But which strategies are contained inthis toolbox? And how do people decide when to use whichdecision strategy? Here, we develop a model according towhich the decision maker selects a decision strategy for a givenchoice problem rationally from a toolbox of strategies; the con-tent of the toolbox is estimated for each individual decisionmaker. Using cross-validation on an empirical data set, we findthat this model of strategy selection from a personal adaptivetoolbox predicts people’s choices better than any single strat-egy (even when it is allowed to vary across participants) andbetter than previously proposed toolbox models. Our modelcomparisons show that both inferring the content of the tool-box and rational strategy selection are critical for accuratelypredicting people’s risky choices. Furthermore, our analysisreveals considerable individual differences in the set of strate-gies people are equipped with and how they choose amongthem; these individual differences could partly explain whysome people make better choices than others. These findingsrepresent an important step towards a complete formalizationof the notion that people select their cognitive strategies froma personal adaptive toolbox.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"decision making; bounded rationality; strategy se-lection; heuristics; computational modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67d2w5vw","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Florian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mohnert","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Amsterdam","department":""},{"first_name":"Thorsten","middle_name":"","last_name":"Pachur","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Falk","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lieder","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28816/galley/18687/download/"}]}