Psychologists have discovered that past actions influence our decisions more than previously thought
A study conducted at the Technical University of Dresden (TUD) shows that past actions influence individuals' future decisions much more strongly than scientists previously thought, providing a new perspective on how people make choices, reports SciTechDaily.
The findings, published in the journal Communications Psychology, could improve understanding of everyday habits and decision-making.
Why do people stick with familiar choices, even when seemingly better options are available?
To investigate this phenomenon, a research team led by Stefan Kiebel, professor of computational cognitive neuroscience at TUD, carried out a large-scale study. The researchers analyzed nine specially designed decision-making tasks, along with six existing data sets, covering more than 700 participants.
The goal was to examine how people learn values in clearly defined situations and how these learned preferences transfer when the situations are combined in new ways.
Psychologists and a study of the power of repetition
“Our study shows that many 'irrational' preferences do not necessarily arise primarily from the fact that people store values relative to other values, but rather from their tendency to repeat actions that they have previously preferred in a given context. This simple repetition can later lead to a certain option continuing to be preferred in new contexts or environments, even if there are equivalent or even better alternatives,” explained Dr. Ben Wagner, lead author of the study.
The researchers used a hierarchical model of reward learning, which combines two basic components: learning from rewards and repetition of past actions. Across the entire data set, this model outperformed alternatives based on value normalization and other more complex explanations. The results suggest that some subjective decisions may arise not from sophisticated mental calculations but from a transfer of habit from previous actions.
“The surprising thing was how powerful repetition alone can change preferences,” explains Wagner. “Options that were chosen more frequently were not only preferred, they were also rated as better.”
These results help explain seemingly illogical behaviors in everyday life, such as buying habits, routines, and repeated choices. They also provide new ways to better model decision-making in fields such as psychology and the behavioral sciences, and could influence how environments are designed to guide decisions.
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