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On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies

Insufficient exploration of one’s surroundings is at the root of many real-life problems, as demonstrated by many famous biases (e.g., the status quo bias, learned helplessness). The current work focuses on the emergence of this phenomenon at the strategy level: the tendency to under-explore the set...

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Autores principales: Cohen, Doron, Teodorescu, Kinneret
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8632697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34867606
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.725690
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author Cohen, Doron
Teodorescu, Kinneret
author_facet Cohen, Doron
Teodorescu, Kinneret
author_sort Cohen, Doron
collection PubMed
description Insufficient exploration of one’s surroundings is at the root of many real-life problems, as demonstrated by many famous biases (e.g., the status quo bias, learned helplessness). The current work focuses on the emergence of this phenomenon at the strategy level: the tendency to under-explore the set of available choice strategies. We demonstrate that insufficient exploration of strategies can also manifest as excessive exploration between options. In such cases, interventions aimed at improving choices by reducing the costs of exploration of options are likely to fail. In Study 1, participants faced an exploration task that implies an infinite number of choice strategies and a small sub-set of (near) optimal solutions. We manipulated the amount of practice participants underwent during the first, shorter game and compared their performance in a second, longer game with an identical payoff structure. Our results show that regardless of the amount of practice, participants in all experimental groups tended to under-explore the strategy space and relied on a specific strategy that implied over-exploration of the option space. That is, under-exploration of strategies was manifested as over-exploration of options. In Study 2, we added a constraint that, on a subset of practice trials, forced participants to exploit familiar options. This manipulation almost doubled the per-trial average outcome on the comparable longer second game. This suggests that forcing participants to experience the effects of different (underexplored) strategy components during practice can greatly increase the chance they make better choices later on.
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spelling pubmed-86326972021-12-02 On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies Cohen, Doron Teodorescu, Kinneret Front Psychol Psychology Insufficient exploration of one’s surroundings is at the root of many real-life problems, as demonstrated by many famous biases (e.g., the status quo bias, learned helplessness). The current work focuses on the emergence of this phenomenon at the strategy level: the tendency to under-explore the set of available choice strategies. We demonstrate that insufficient exploration of strategies can also manifest as excessive exploration between options. In such cases, interventions aimed at improving choices by reducing the costs of exploration of options are likely to fail. In Study 1, participants faced an exploration task that implies an infinite number of choice strategies and a small sub-set of (near) optimal solutions. We manipulated the amount of practice participants underwent during the first, shorter game and compared their performance in a second, longer game with an identical payoff structure. Our results show that regardless of the amount of practice, participants in all experimental groups tended to under-explore the strategy space and relied on a specific strategy that implied over-exploration of the option space. That is, under-exploration of strategies was manifested as over-exploration of options. In Study 2, we added a constraint that, on a subset of practice trials, forced participants to exploit familiar options. This manipulation almost doubled the per-trial average outcome on the comparable longer second game. This suggests that forcing participants to experience the effects of different (underexplored) strategy components during practice can greatly increase the chance they make better choices later on. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-11-12 /pmc/articles/PMC8632697/ /pubmed/34867606 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.725690 Text en Copyright © 2021 Cohen and Teodorescu. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Cohen, Doron
Teodorescu, Kinneret
On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies
title On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies
title_full On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies
title_fullStr On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies
title_full_unstemmed On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies
title_short On the Effect of Practice on Exploration and Exploitation of Options and Strategies
title_sort on the effect of practice on exploration and exploitation of options and strategies
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8632697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34867606
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.725690
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