Probabilistic decision making in children II
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Final Report Abstract
From what age on and under which conditions do children systematically use probabilistic information in risky decision-making? We identified competencies but also systematic weaknesses in children’s decision-making. We were able to show that 5- to 6-year-olds are already able to integrate multiple information in complex environments. The integration of multiple information does not cause children as much difficulty as one would expect from models of adaptive decision-making. Our findings support connectionist approaches to intuitive decision-making, which describe integration as a fundamental automatic process. Accordingly, the supposedly easy situation, when only a few pieces of information are important (i.e. probable), seems to cause problems for children. The difficulty of prioritizing concerns both being able to search for information in a targeted manner and to follow the most probable information for choice. This phenomenon of probability neglect dominates among 5- to 6-yearolds and is overcome by only about a third of 9- to 10-year-olds. In the second project phase, we were able to show that these difficulties reflect a deficit in information use rather than a process deficit. This means that children can make good decisions in certain, facilitating environments despite a lack of concept development. If the decision-making process is broken down into different sub-steps, 5- to 6-year-olds successfully manage the decision-making process right up to the last, critical inference step. In addition, they use probabilities. In our studies, preschoolers recognized the probabilities of advice-givers, were able to choose the advice-giver with the highest probability, and were able to follow advices for choice. However, 5- to 6-year-olds and a substantial portion of 9- to 10-year-olds failed if the decision contained a second inference step: They could not prioritize among multiple advice-givers. In line with this, we were able to show that one can impact children's decision-making with environmental structuring that affects prioritization (e.g., contiguity of information), while environmental structuring that affects other decision-making steps has no beneficial effect (e.g., format of advice). Taken together, our findings show that children's decisionmaking depends on the type of the decision task. The extent to which prioritization plays a role and is supported largely determines the quality of children’s decision-making.
Publications
- (2016). Lost in Search: (Mal-) Adaptation to probabilistic decision environments in children and adults. Developmental Psychology, 52, 311-325
Betsch, T., Lehmann, A., Lindow, S., Lang, A., & Schoemann, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000077) - (2016). Thinking beyond boundaries. In L. Macchi, M. Bagassi, & R. Viale (Eds.), Cognitive unconscious and human rationality (pp. 241-256). Cambridge (MA): MIT Press
Betsch, T., Ritter, J., Lang, A., & Lindow, S.
- (2018). Children’s application of decision strategies in a compensatory environment. Judgment and Decision Making, 13, 514–528
Betsch, T., Lehmann, A., Jekel, M., Lindow, S., & Glöckner, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/s1930297500006562) - (2018). Neglect of probabilities in decision making with and without feedback. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 191
Lang, A., & Betsch, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00191) - (2018). Sonification and visualization of predecisional information search: Identifying toolboxes in children. Developmental Psychology, 54, 474-481
Betsch, T., Wünsche, K., Großkopf, A., Schröder, K., & Stenmans, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000447) - (2020). Children's trust in informants in risky decisions. Cognitive Development, 53, 100846
Betsch, T., Lehmann, A., Lindow, S., & Buttelmann, D.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2019.100846) - (2021). From perception to inference: utilization of probabilities as decision weights in children. Memory and Cognition, 49, 826–842
Betsch, T., Lindow, S., Lehmann, A., & Stenmans, R.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01127-0)
