[Jpost] Research on decision-making has shown that when people are making decisions, they have to evaluate their options over time because they often don’t immediately know what to do.
| Too many psych research projects are based on the responses of easily available undergraduate psych students, who tend toward an exploratory rather than decisive personality type. The decisive personality type (eg. engineers, business managers, the military) has a great deal of trouble not making decisions quickly. |
Corresponding author and psychology Prof. Ian Krajbich, who studies the cognitive process by which people make choices, and colleagues led by Fadong Chen at China’s Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Normal University, asked 353 college-student volunteers to choose between patient and impatient alternatives – for example to receive $40 in seven days or $60 in 30 days, by clicking their choice on a computer screen while software tracked and recorded the movements of their mouse. In some cases, participants had to make their decisions in two seconds, in others they had to wait 10 seconds or had unlimited time before choosing. At the end of the study, participants earned money based on one decision.
| With that subject base and base size, the results can be no more than suggestive. Re-do it with a thousand or more subjects from a variety of backgrounds — see how the results compare. |
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