Holistic Information Integration in Child Decision Making

Weighted-additive (WADD) strategies require decision makers to integrate multiple values weighted by their relevance. From what age can children make choices in line with such a WADD-strategy? We compare multi-attribute decisions of children (6–7; 8–10; 11–12-year-olds) with adults in an open information-board environment without pre-decisional information search. In two experiments, we classify decision strategies based on individual choice patterns and find that in all age groups the majority of participants are users of a WADD-strategy. Simple decision heuristics such as lexicographic strategies were applied rarely by children and not at all by adults. In two additional follow-up studies, we further investigate the underlying process of WADD-application by analysing decision latencies in combination with a retrospective think-aloud study. Results suggest that children did not apply WADD-strategies in a deliberate fashion in our experiments. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the ability to make good and quick decisions by holistically integrating information is already present in young children. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.