Encouraging far-sightedness with automatically generated descriptions of optimal planning strategies: Potentials and Limitations
People often fall victim to decision-making biases, e.g. short-sightedness, that lead to unfavorable outcomes in their lives. It is possible to overcome these biases by teaching people better decision-making strategies. Finding effective interventions is an open problem, with a key challenge being the lack of transfer to the real world. Here, we tested a new approach to improving human decision-making that leverages Artificial Intelligence to discover procedural descriptions of effective planning strategies. Our benchmark problem regarded improving far-sightedness. We found our intervention elicits transfer to a similar task in a different domain, but its effects in more naturalistic financial decisions were not statistically significant. Even though the tested intervention is on par with conventional approaches, which also struggle in far-transfer, further improvements are required to help people make better decisions in real life. We conclude that future work should focus on training decision-making in more naturalistic scenarios.
| Author(s): | Becker, Frederic and Skirzynski, Julian Mateusz and van Opheusden, Bas and Lieder, Falk |
| Book Title: | Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Month: | July |
| BibTeX Type: | Conference Paper (conference) |
| Event Name: | Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
| State: | Published |
| URL: | https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mz7t7bx#main |
| Digital: | True |
| Electronic Archiving: | grant_archive |
| How Published: | Online |
| Institution: | Cognitive Science Society |
| ISBN: | 1069-7977 |
| Language: | English |
| Organization: | Cognitive Science Society |
BibTeX
@conference{Becker2021Encouraging,
title = {Encouraging far-sightedness with automatically generated descriptions of optimal planning strategies: Potentials and Limitations},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
abstract = {People often fall victim to decision-making biases, e.g. short-sightedness, that lead to unfavorable outcomes in their lives. It is possible to overcome these biases by teaching people better decision-making strategies. Finding effective interventions is an open problem, with a key challenge being the lack of transfer to the real world. Here, we tested a new approach to improving human decision-making that leverages Artificial Intelligence to discover procedural descriptions of effective planning strategies. Our benchmark problem regarded improving far-sightedness. We found our intervention elicits transfer to a similar task in a different domain, but its effects in more naturalistic financial decisions were not statistically significant. Even though the tested intervention is on par with conventional approaches, which also struggle in far-transfer, further improvements are required to help people make better decisions in real life. We conclude that future work should focus on training decision-making in more naturalistic scenarios.},
howpublished = {Online},
organization = {Cognitive Science Society},
institution = {Cognitive Science Society},
month = jul,
year = {2021},
author = {Becker, Frederic and Skirzynski, Julian Mateusz and van Opheusden, Bas and Lieder, Falk},
url = {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7mz7t7bx#main},
month_numeric = {7}
}