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

Abstract

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.

The value of choice facilitates subsequent memory across development

“…Perceived control has been proposed to function as an intrinsic reward (Bobadilla-Suarez et al, 2017;Deci & Ryan, 2000;Leotti & Delgado, 2011), which suggests a potential mechanism underlying the effects on memory observed in our study. Both humans and non-human animals are sensitive to the controllability of their environments (Moscarello & Hartley, 2017) and prefer having agency (Bown, Read, & Summers, 2003;Catania & Sagvolden, 1980;Cordova & Lepper, 1996;Leotti, Iyengar, & Ochsner, 2010;Suzuki, 1997;Suzuki, 1999).…”

“…Both humans and non-human animals are sensitive to the controllability of their environments (Moscarello & Hartley, 2017) and prefer having agency (Bown, Read, & Summers, 2003;Catania & Sagvolden, 1980;Cordova & Lepper, 1996;Leotti, Iyengar, & Ochsner, 2010;Suzuki, 1997;Suzuki, 1999). People will pay a premium to have control even doing so is suboptimal (Bobadilla-Suarez et al, 2017;Owens, Grossman, & Fackler, 2014;. Consistent with this evidence that control is subjectively rewarding, striatal brain regions typically engaged during the anticipation and receipt of reward are also sensitive to conditions of agency (Fujiwara et al, 2013;Leotti & Delgado, 2011;Murty et al, 2015;, and rewards that are obtained contingently elicit greater striatal activity (Tricomi, Delgado, & Fiez, 2004) and function as more robust reinforcers (Cockburn, Collins, & Frank, 2014) than those that are passively received.…”

“…If prioritizing the encoding of choice outcomes is an effortful goal-directed process, then the ability to preferentially allocate this cognitive resource to contexts in which agency has utility would likely continue to develop into adulthood. Alternatively, agency has been proposed to function as an intrinsic reinforcer (Bobadilla-Suarez, Sunstein, & Sharot, 2017;Leotti & Delgado, 2011), which, in turn, may facilitate memory even in the absence of cognitive effort (Murty et al, 2015). As children exhibit behavioral and neural sensitivity to both intrinsic and extrinsic reinforcers (Galvan et al, 2006;Satterthwaite et al, 2012), such an account would suggest that their memory might be just as sensitive as adults' to contexts in which agency can be leveraged to achieve rewarding outcomes, and thus we would not expect any age-related effects.…”

Social mindfulness: Prosocial the active way

“…Based on the premise that experiencing a certain degree of choice is generally appreciated (e.g. Aoki et al, 2014;Bobadilla-Suarez, Sunstein, & Sharot, 2017;Bown, Read, & Summers, 2003;Leotti & Delgado, 2011), the experimental paradigm to measure social mindfulness (henceforth the SoMi paradigm) hinges on leaving or limiting choice to others. In a dyadic task, a first mover chooses from a set of three or four products, with the information that another person will choose second.…”

Don't patronize me! An experiment on preferences for authorship

“…Subjects are, for example, unwilling to use algorithms that are far better in predicting outcomes than they are—unless they can have some small effect on the predicted result (Dietvorst, Simmons, & Massey, 2016). Likewise, they prefer to take a decision themselves when interacting with humans (Bobadilla‐Suarez, Sunstein, & Sharot, 2017; Dominguez‐Martinez, Sloof, & von Siemens, 2014; Fehr, Schmidt, Herz, & Wilkening, 2013). Neri and Rommeswinkel (2014), for example, show that subjects are interference‐averse in the sense that they prefer others not to affect their payoff.…”