Today, we had Prof. Dr. Tilmann Betsch from the University of Erfurt telling us about his work on children’s decision making, in particular, their tendency to utilise all available information when making a decision (as opposed to focusing on the most relevant pieces). These findings seem really interesting in suggesting that the ability (or motivation?) to prioritise information develops between late childhood and late adolescence.
Here’s are some key points that Dr. Betsch used to summarise his talk titled “Treasure Hunters and MouseKids: Some lessons to be learned from child decision making”:
1. Children around young school age begin to develop a competence to systematically use probabilities as decision weights.
2. Intrusion and pattern effects in children and adults indicate unselective information processing even in environments that invite simple strategies.
3. Pre-decisional information search is a demanding task: (Intuitive) understanding of probability is not sufficient a condition for mapping search on weight distributions.
4. Children are more inclined than adults to rely on uninformative experience in the presence of reliable descriptive information. Even adults, however, are susceptible to experience biases.
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