Strategy selection in decisions from givens: Deciding at a glance?

Abstract

People deciding between alternatives have at their disposal a toolbox containing both compensatory strategies, which take into account all available attributes of those alternatives, and noncompensatory strategies, which consider only some of the attributes. It is commonly assumed that noncompensatory strategies play only a minor role in decisions from givens, where attribute information is openly presented, because all attributes can be processed automatically “at a glance.” Based on a literature review, however, I establish that previous studies on strategy selection in decisions from givens have yielded highly heterogeneous findings, including evidence of widespread use of noncompensatory strategies. Drawing on insights from visual attention research on subitizing, I argue that this heterogeneity might be due to differences across studies in the number of attributes and in whether the same or different symbols are used to represent high/low attribute values across attributes. I tested the impact of these factors in two experiments with decisions from givens in which both the number of attributes shown for each alternative and the coding of attribute values was manipulated. An analysis of participants’ strategy use with a Bayesian multimethod approach (taking into account both decisions and response-time patterns) showed that a noncompensatory strategy was more frequently selected in conditions with a higher number of attributes; the type of attribute coding scheme did not affect strategy selection. Using a compensatory strategy in the conditions with eight (vs. four) attributes was associated with rather long response times and a high rate of strategy execution errors. The results suggest that decisions from givens can incur cognitive costs that prohibit reliance on automatic compensatory decision making and that can favor the adaptive selection of a noncompensatory strategy.