All Hail Suboptimal Choice! Now, Can We "Fix" It?

Abstract

Zentall (2019) describes cases in which nonhuman animals show interesting failures in some kinds of choice tests. The failures are particularly valuable, he argues, for understanding the nature of choice behavior and why it may be adaptive in some contexts but then necessarily may look suboptimal in others. I agree that these are interesting test cases. I discuss some of the ways in which the presented results converge among themselves, and with some other choice tasks, on the idea that choices are made in contexts, and those contexts play as large a role as do the actual choice options themselves. Framing effects, temporal discounting, and motivation levels of choosers all lead to choice behavior that reflects bounded rationality, just as is true for humans. In this way, suboptimal choice is natural to expect in some instances, and potentially can be offset by manipulations to the environment in which the choice is made.