The Right Tool for the Job? Comparing an Evidence Accumulation and a Naive Strategy Selection Model of Decision Making

Analyses of multi-attribute decision problems are dominated by accounts which assume people select from a repertoire of cognitive strategies to make decisions. This paper explores an alternative account based on sequential sampling and evidence accumulation. Two experiments varied aspects of a decision environment to examine competing models of decision behavior. The results highlighted the intra-participant consistency but inter-participant differences in the amount of evidence considered in decisions. This pattern was best captured by a sequential evidence accumulation model (SEQ) which treated pure Take-The-Best (TTB) and pure ‘‘rational’’ (RAT) models as special cases of a single model. The SEQ model was also preferred by the minimum description length (MDL) criterion to a naive strategy-selection model (NSS) which assumed that TTB or RAT could be selected with some probability for each decision. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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