Abstract
Little is known about the interplay between affective and cognitive processes of decision making within the bounded rationality perspective, in particular for the debate on adaptive decision making and strategy selection. This gap in the knowledge is particularly important as affect and deliberation may direct preferences in opposite directions. How do decision makers solve such dissonance? In this paper, we address this question by exploring the use of integral affect as a choice heuristic in comparison with and in conjunction to “take the best,” and weighted addition of attributes (WADD). We operationalize theories of reliance on affect in choice through a "Take the emotionally best" algorithm. Its predictive power is experimentally tested against other models, including mixed-sequential cognitive/affective procedures. We find that individual decisions are better predicted by a sequential combination of "Take the emotionally best" and "Take the best" with a slight dominance of the former. Conditions of cognitive/affective ambivalence, low discrimination ability and high complexity provide the cognitive architecture where such blended choice strategies predict decisions more precisely. This implies that reliance on integral affect may precede the use of cognitive cues following an ecological rationality perspective rather than supporting a kind of competition between affect and cognition as implied in current literature.
Highlights
When making decisions, humans are motivated by what they feel and what they think is the best action
It is currently accepted that human beings are able to adjust the depth and extent of their reasoning process according to tasks and situational demands [1]
These are emotional responses generated by the recall of a Affect-based heuristics and cognitive heurıstics within bounded rationality personal or hypothetical emotional event that is associated to a current experience, and that elicits a somatic state when brought to working memory, for example, when evaluating decision alternatives
Summary
Humans are motivated by what they feel and what they think is the best action. Integral affect is the emotional response that is elicited by features of the decision target: real, perceived, or imagined [21] This type of affect may play a salient role in decision making processes because it is used as a resource-efficient proxy for value [6], which implies that people infer information about decision objects from the affective responses such objects elicit [19]. Integral affect tends to be holistic and insensitive to scale, magnitude [30], and probabilities [16], and it is highly accessible [31] Such characteristics lead us to expect that judgments and choices based on Integral Affect are mostly connected to associative based decision making. Associative and rule-based systems of thought [8] engage different computational processes The former, known as System I, appeals to automatic, non-conscious processing that most likely requires long term associations. The latter, on the other hand, known as System II appeals to deliberate, conscious processing that tends to exhaust short-term memory. [8] This is not to say that System I is entirely emotional, but that integral affect, from its informational nature, is a salient constituent of intuition
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