Abstract
Dual-process approaches of decision-making examine the interaction between affective/intuitive and deliberative processes underlying value judgment. From this perspective, decisions are supported by a combination of relatively explicit capabilities for abstract reasoning and relatively implicit evolved domain-general as well as learned domain-specific affective responses. One such approach, the somatic markers hypothesis (SMH), expresses these implicit processes as a system of evolved primary emotions supplemented by associations between affect and experience that accrue over lifetime, or somatic markers. In this view, somatic markers are useful only if their local capability to predict the value of an action is above a baseline equal to the predictive capability of the combined rational and primary emotional subsystems. We argue that decision-making has often been conceived of as a linear process: the effect of decision sequences is additive, local utility is cumulative, and there is no strong environmental feedback. This widespread assumption can have consequences for answering questions regarding the relative weight between the systems and their interaction within a cognitive architecture. We introduce a mathematical formalization of the SMH and study it in situations of dynamic, non-linear decision chains using a discrete-time stochastic model. We find, contrary to expectations, that decision-making events can interact non-additively with the environment in apparently paradoxical ways. We find that in non-lethal situations, primary emotions are represented globally over and above their local weight, showing a tendency for overcautiousness in situated decision chains. We also show that because they tend to counteract this trend, poorly attuned somatic markers that by themselves do not locally enhance decision-making, can still produce an overall positive effect. This result has developmental and evolutionary implications since, by promoting exploratory behavior, somatic markers would seem to be beneficial even at early stages when experiential attunement is poor. Although the model is formulated in terms of the SMH, the implications apply to dual systems theories in general since it makes minimal assumptions about the nature of the processes involved.
Highlights
Let us assume that the road is sufficiently long, so that as we describe the transitions between states using a discrete Markov chain, the distribution of probabilities will settle into a stationary state
We have questioned some of the basic assumptions that underlie conceptual and empirical work on dual system approaches to decision-making and we have expressed an alternative in a formalization and model of the somatic markers hypothesis (SMH)
It is clear that common sense intuitions such as assuming that somatic markers (SMs) must have a positive predictive ability to make sense are found wanting when applied to scenarios involving stochastic, non-independent decision chains
Summary
Psychological and neurobiological evidence accumulated over the last two decades has supported a dual system account of decisionmaking (Damasio, 1994; Epstein, 1994; Sloman, 1996; Bechara et al, 1997; Lieberman, 2000; Evans, 2003, 2008; Bechara and Damasio, 2005; Ferreira et al, 2006; Weber and Johnson, 2009; Morewedge and Kahneman, 2010). Under a wide range of circumstances the quality of decisions is enhanced by intuitive and affective processes that regulate and advantageously bias fast and automatic judgments. Distraction from thinking too much about pros and cons often has positive benefits for judgment quality (Betsch et al, 2001; Dijksterhuis et al, 2006; Usher et al, 2011). Dual system theories postulate the existence of two distinct cognitive systems at play during decision-making (Evans, 2003, 2008): System 1, which is implicit, intuitive, affectively loaded, functionally faster, automatic, more concrete and situation-dependent, harder to report, and evolutionarily older not necessarily independent of experience and System 2, which is deliberative, functionally slower, mostly sequential, involving conscious, conceptual, rule-based and/or linguistic processes, more domain-general, experience-dependent, easier to articulate, and www.frontiersin.org
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