Human Behavior in Suboptimal Choice Tasks: Defining Optimality
People’s “dumb” choices usually track the last minute of payoffs, not the overall odds.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bodily et al. (2024) asked adults to pick between two computer options.
Each option paid points on different schedules.
The team watched which option people called “better” after many trials.
What they found
Most people ended up picking the higher-paying side.
Yet in two set-ups they kept picking the lower-paying side.
The “mistake” matched the side that had paid more in the minutes before.
How this fits with other research
Older work said humans are naturally good at maximizing. Logue et al. (1986) showed women almost always took the bigger later reward.
Stockhorst (1994) added that shorter waits boost acceptance of lean schedules. Bodily’s data agree: local payoff history, not just overall rate, steers the next click.
de la Piedad et al. (2006) saw pigeons stick with a side after long stays, even when pay dropped. The same sunk-cost-like pull shows up in people here.
Paglieri et al. (2015) warned that “impulsive” choices can reflect weak motivation, not poor self-control. Bodily’s results echo the warning: check what the person has actually earned lately before you call a choice irrational.
Why it matters
When a client keeps “picking the wrong thing,” pull the data. Graph the last ten rewards that choice produced. If the history is rich, honor it in your intervention. Thin the old payoff, boost the new, and watch the switch happen faster.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Suboptimal choice behavior, or behavior that leads to a loss of resources over time, has been observed in a laboratory setting from multiple species. A procedure commonly used to capture this effect involves presenting two alternatives during choice trials, one of which is optimal whereas the other is suboptimal. The optimal alternative yields reinforcement more often than the suboptimal alternative, but often does not produce signals that indicate whether reinforcement will occur. The suboptimal alternative produces less reinforcement than the optimal alternative but may include reinforcement-predictive stimuli that indicate to the organism whether reinforcement will occur. This procedural framework has consistently produced a preference for the suboptimal alternative in pigeons and, to a lesser extent, rats. However, human participants have demonstrated preference for the optimal alternative. Following a review of past suboptimal choice research, we applied the reinforcement-derived definition of optimality to two sets of our previously published human data. We found that under multiple conditions, human choice behavior was consistent with what was predicted by the proportion of obtained reinforcement, thus supporting that the behavior was optimal. However, we found that participants in two conditions chose the suboptimal alternative more than expected. This finding could be considered as a demonstration of suboptimal choice in humans. We propose that comparing choice behavior to what past obtained reinforcement outcomes would predict might be a more accurate view of whether patterns of choice are within the parameters of this task.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s40614-024-00411-7