糖心原创

Title: "Improving Decision Making under Risk: The Role of Information Processing Guidance" (with Abigail Barr and Martin Sefton)

Abstract: This paper tests whether Information Processing Guidance (IPG) — a Bayesian boost that directs attention to decision-relevant information and scaffolds the reasoning process — reduces Bayesian decision errors, whether any improvement survives the withdrawal of guidance, and how it interacts with task difficulty and cognitive traits. In a laboratory experiment, participants complete multiple rounds of a Bayesian investment task across eight problems of varying difficulty, measured by a newly constructed Cognitive Complexity Score (CCS). Guidance lowers decision errors on average, significantly so under continuous (IPG) treatment and only marginally under withdrawn (IPGW) treatment, and task difficulty itself reliably raises errors, though this average pattern conceals substantial heterogeneity. Cognitive Reflection (CR) plays the key moderating role: higher-CR participants benefit significantly more from guidance, whereas CR has no effect on errors in its absence. Disaggregating by CR tertile, the lowest tertile derives no detectable benefit, the middle and highest tertiles show reductions of 6 to 12 percentage points, and only the highest tertile’s benefit persists after withdrawal. Guidance therefore functions as an attentional scaffold for the moderately reflective, amplifying an existing capacity for deliberate reasoning, and as a durable, long-term boost for the most reflective, whose gains survive its removal.