Researchers studying how randomness and unpredictability in the environment affect people's willingness to spend cognitive resources on planning have concluded that the lower the reliability of a reward and the weaker the sense of control over a situation, the faster a person makes decisions and simplifies their strategies, according to infohub.kz.
The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications. It is based on three online experiments involving 300 adult respondents living in the United States.
Participants were asked to navigate a virtual maze of treasure chests. Moving through it required choosing between left and right directions in order to score as many points as possible. The scientists modeled three types of uncertainty: information reliability (the appearance of "secret" chests with unpredictable rewards), environmental volatility (the random changing of chest values as participants moved), and controllability (the probability that a chosen direction would work in the opposite way). Using mathematical models, the researchers analyzed how long participants took to make their first decision and how accurate their choices were.
The results showed a single trend: as the unpredictability of the environment increased, participants made their first move significantly faster, indicating a reduction in the time allotted to planning. Instead of complex probability calculations, respondents switched to simplified decision-making strategies and paid less attention to differences in the potential payoff of routes.
The scientists concluded that under conditions of randomness, people cognitively conserve resources, abandoning in-depth analysis in favor of simpler algorithms.