Habit-like repetition influences decisions more than previously thought, large-scale study finds

Why do people often make decisions in the same pattern and choose the tried and tested, even when there are apparently better alternatives? A research team led by Stefan Kiebel, Professor of Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at TUD, investigated this question in a large-scale study. To this end, the team examined nine newly collected decision-making tasks and six previously published data sets with a total of over 700 participants to determine how people initially learn values in clearly defined decision-making contexts and which of these learned options they subsequently prefer in newly combined contexts.