Information foraging with an oracle

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Decision Making
• Behavioral Economics

Background:

• Individuals often face decisions involving exploiting known options versus exploring new ones.
• Balancing costs and benefits is crucial in ecological and everyday choices.
• External advice can be sought from experts or recommendation systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how individuals manage cost-benefit tradeoffs when deciding to seek expert advice versus self-exploration.
• To determine the influence of economic and epistemic goals on advice-seeking behavior.
• To examine the role of individual differences, such as intolerance of uncertainty, in these decisions.

Main Methods:

• Two studies were designed where participants chose between paying for expert advice or searching for options independently.
• Experimental manipulations altered the optimal choice and the value of expert guidance.
• Participant choices were analyzed in relation to payoff maximization and uncertainty reduction.

Main Results:

• Participants were more likely to seek advice when it directly improved potential payoff (Study A).
• Advice seeking increased when it reduced choice uncertainty, independent of payoff (Study B).
• Individuals with higher intolerance of uncertainty showed a stronger tendency to seek advice for uncertainty reduction.

Conclusions:

• People seek expert advice to achieve both economic goals (maximizing payoff) and epistemic goals (minimizing uncertainty).
• Advice-seeking decisions are dynamically sensitive to the perceived costs and benefits.
• Individual differences, particularly intolerance of uncertainty, significantly modulate the propensity to seek external guidance.