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The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses

Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decision or to delegate the decision task to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian, Sunstein, Cass R., Sharot, Tali
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5652145/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29070920
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11166-017-9259-x
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author Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian
Sunstein, Cass R.
Sharot, Tali
author_facet Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian
Sunstein, Cass R.
Sharot, Tali
author_sort Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian
collection PubMed
description Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decision or to delegate the decision task to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that participants choose to pay in order to control their own payoff more than they should if they were to maximize monetary rewards and minimize monetary losses. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Nor can the results be explained by lack of information. Rather, the results seem to reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and of losses. Moreover, our data indicate that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains.
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spelling pubmed-56521452017-10-23 The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian Sunstein, Cass R. Sharot, Tali J Risk Uncertain Article Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decision or to delegate the decision task to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that participants choose to pay in order to control their own payoff more than they should if they were to maximize monetary rewards and minimize monetary losses. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Nor can the results be explained by lack of information. Rather, the results seem to reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and of losses. Moreover, our data indicate that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains. Springer US 2017-07-27 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5652145/ /pubmed/29070920 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11166-017-9259-x Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Bobadilla-Suarez, Sebastian
Sunstein, Cass R.
Sharot, Tali
The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
title The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
title_full The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
title_fullStr The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
title_full_unstemmed The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
title_short The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
title_sort intrinsic value of choice: the propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5652145/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29070920
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11166-017-9259-x
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