TY - JOUR
T1 - Rational Simplification and Rigidity in Human Planning
AU - Ho, Mark K.
AU - Cohen, Jonathan D.
AU - Griffiths, Thomas L.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
PY - 2023/11
Y1 - 2023/11
N2 - Planning underpins the impressive flexibility of goal-directed behavior. However, even when planning, people can display surprising rigidity in how they think about problems (e.g., “functional fixedness”) that lead them astray. How can our capacity for behavioral flexibility be reconciled with our susceptibility to conceptual inflexibility? We propose that these tendencies reflect avoidance of two cognitive costs: the cost of representing task details and the cost of switching between representations. To test this hypothesis, we developed a novel paradigm that affords participants opportunities to choose different families of simplified representations to plan. In two preregistered, online studies (Ns = 377 and 294 adults), we found that participants’ optimal behavior, suboptimal behavior, and reaction time were explained by a computational model that formalized people’s avoidance of representational complexity and switching. These results demonstrate how the selection of simplified, rigid representations leads to the otherwise puzzling combination of flexibility and inflexibility observed in problem solving.
AB - Planning underpins the impressive flexibility of goal-directed behavior. However, even when planning, people can display surprising rigidity in how they think about problems (e.g., “functional fixedness”) that lead them astray. How can our capacity for behavioral flexibility be reconciled with our susceptibility to conceptual inflexibility? We propose that these tendencies reflect avoidance of two cognitive costs: the cost of representing task details and the cost of switching between representations. To test this hypothesis, we developed a novel paradigm that affords participants opportunities to choose different families of simplified representations to plan. In two preregistered, online studies (Ns = 377 and 294 adults), we found that participants’ optimal behavior, suboptimal behavior, and reaction time were explained by a computational model that formalized people’s avoidance of representational complexity and switching. These results demonstrate how the selection of simplified, rigid representations leads to the otherwise puzzling combination of flexibility and inflexibility observed in problem solving.
KW - causal reasoning
KW - functional fixedness
KW - open data
KW - open materials
KW - planning
KW - preregistered
KW - problem solving
KW - task switching
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85174855808&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85174855808&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/09567976231200547
DO - 10.1177/09567976231200547
M3 - Article
C2 - 37878525
AN - SCOPUS:85174855808
SN - 0956-7976
VL - 34
SP - 1281
EP - 1292
JO - Psychological Science
JF - Psychological Science
IS - 11
ER -