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People can make use of a range of heuristic and rational, compensatory strategies to perform a multiple-cue judgment task. It has been proposed that people are sensitive to the amount of cognitive effort required to employ decision strategies. Experiment 1 employed a dual-task methodology to investigate whether participants' preference for heuristic versus compensatory decision strategies can be altered by increasing the cognitive demands of the task. As indicated by participants' decision times, a secondary task interfered more with the performance of a heuristic than compensatory decision strategy but did not affect the proportions of participants using either type of strategy. A stimulus set effect suggested that the conjunction of cue salience and cue validity might play a determining role in strategy selection. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that when a perceptually salient cue was also the most valid, the majority of participants preferred a single-cue heuristic strategy. Overall, the results contradict the view that heuristics are more likely to be adopted when a task is made more cognitively demanding. It is argued that people employ 2 learning processes during training, one an associative learning process in which cue-outcome associations are developed by sampling multiple cues, and another that involves the sequential examination of single cues to serve as a basis for a single-cue heuristic.
Keywords: strategy selection, decision making, cognitive effort
Many tasks require us to identify or distinguish different things to some level. When a patient visits a doctor complaining of an illness, the doctor tries to determine the specific disease that affects the patient. When a soldier on the battlefield sees a human being, he or she must rapidly determine whether that person is an enemy, a friend, or a neutral party. To make such judgments, people rely on characteristics, also called cues, which serve as evidence toward one alternative identification or another.
A great deal of research has examined the cognitive strategies people use to perform these kinds of multiple-cue decision tasks. So-called rational models propose that people apply compensatory procedures that consider all available cues and their relative degrees of association to each alternative (Payne & Bettman, 2001). Heuristic models, in contrast, assume that people apply simple rules that often rely on a subset of available information (Betsch &...