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When to keep trying and when to let go: Benchmarking optimal quitting.
Nikolay Sukhov1, Rachit Dubey2, Annie Duke3
1Department of Physics, Princeton University.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
|June 16, 2025
Summary
Knowing when to quit is crucial. This study reveals people largely follow optimal strategies for goal pursuit but are less sensitive to remaining trials, sometimes persisting with suboptimal choices.
Area of Science:
- Decision-making psychology
- Cognitive science
- Behavioral economics
Background:
- Persisting with goals is vital, but knowing when to stop is equally important.
- Understanding the decision-making process for quitting versus persisting is key to goal attainment.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how individuals decide when to persist with or abandon options for stochastic rewards.
- To compare human decision-making against an optimal strategy in a novel task.
Main Methods:
- Designed a novel task with finite opportunities for pursuing stochastic rewards.
- Included an option to abandon a current choice for a new one, with no return.
- Conducted a large-scale, preregistered experiment with 3,632 participants.
Main Results:
- Participants largely aligned with the optimal strategy, exploring few options before settling.
- Persistence decisions were influenced by option performance, similar to the optimal strategy.
- Participants showed less sensitivity to remaining trials and a tendency to persist with suboptimal options.
Conclusions:
- Human decision-making in goal pursuit shows significant alignment with optimal strategies.
- Individuals could improve goal attainment by better adjusting persistence based on remaining opportunities.
- Further research can explore interventions to mitigate suboptimal persistence.
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