Study suggests people rely on gut instincts even when they know better

“There’s this tension between doing what you should do, at least from a statistical perspective, versus doing what worked out well recently.”

IAN KRAJBICH

STUDY CO-AUTHOR

A new study has countered the thought that people make the less-than-ideal choice simply because they don’t know any better.

Research published last Monday in the journal Nature Communications revealed that people usually rely on a “gut feeling” instead of what they’ve discovered will work for them most often.

“There’s this tension between doing what you should do, at least from a statistical perspective, versus doing what worked out well recently,” Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology and economics at the Ohio State University, said in a press release.

The study, led by former Ohio State graduate student Arkady Konovalov — who is now a postdoc at the University of Zurich in Switzerland — and Krajbich tracked participants’ mouse movements as they played a simple computer game. In the game, participants could make more money if they noticed and exploited patterns. Researchers monitored their mouse movements to see if participants took notice of the patterns.

In one example, participants looked at the top half of the screen and chose one of two symbols — one on the top left and one on the top right. Then, they would move the cursor to the bottom portion of the screen and a symbol would appear in either bottom corner — the right or left. To see their reward, they would click on that symbol; participants repeated the game dozens of times.

Researchers could determine whether the participants learned the pattern between what they chose on each half of the screen by watching the mouse movements. Choosing the top left symbol usually led to the bottom symbol, which had the biggest reward.

“We could tell where they thought the next symbol was going to appear by where they moved the cursor,” Krajbich said. “And we found that nearly everyone — 56 of the 57 participants — learned the pattern. That was no problem for our participants.”

Still, the study was designed so that the part of the study that typically leads to the biggest reward does not work 10 to 40 per cent of the time. Participants followed the pattern that worked at least six out of 10 times — the plan that lead them to the most success —only around 20 per cent of the time.

But in other parts of the study where the pattern that produced the biggest reward was consistent, participants followed it about 40 per cent of the time.

“It can be hard to judge whether you made a good or bad decision based just on the outcome,” Krajbich said. “We can make a good decision and just get unlucky and have a bad outcome. Or we can make a bad decision and get lucky and have a good outcome.”

According to Krajbich, the lesson is people frequently learn what action works the best, “(they) just have to put that knowledge into practice.”