The complementary role of affect-based and cognitive heuristics to make decisions under conditions of ambivalence and complexity

Little is known about the interplay between affective and cognitive processes of decision making within the bounded rationality perspective, in particular for the debate on adaptive decision making and strategy selection. This gap in the knowledge is particularly important as affect and deliberation...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Trujillo, C.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:Colombia
Institución:Universidad de los Andes
Repositorio:Séneca: repositorio Uniandes
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:repositorio.uniandes.edu.co:1992/47084
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/1992/47084
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0206724
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Complementary role
Affect-based
Cognitive heuristics
Ambivalence and complexity
Descripción
Sumario:Little is known about the interplay between affective and cognitive processes of decision making within the bounded rationality perspective, in particular for the debate on adaptive decision making and strategy selection. This gap in the knowledge is particularly important as affect and deliberation may direct preferences in opposite directions. How do decision makers solve such dissonance? In this paper, we address this question by exploring the use of integral affect as a choice heuristic in comparison with and in conjunction to ¿take the best,¿ and weighted addition of attributes (WADD). We operationalize theories of reliance on affect in choice through a "Take the emotionally best" algorithm. Its predictive power is experimentally tested against other models, including mixed-sequential cognitive/affective procedures. We find that individual decisions are better predicted by a sequential combination of "Take the emotionally best" and "Take the best" with a slight dominance of the former. Conditions of cognitive/affective ambivalence, low discrimination ability and high complexity provide the cognitive architecture where such blended choice strategies predict decisions more precisely. This implies that reliance on integral affect may precede the use of cognitive cues following an ecological rationality perspective rather than supporting a kind of competition between affect and cognition as implied in current literature.