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Abstract Each day people make decisions about complex topics such as health and personal finances. Causal models of these domains have been created to aid decisions, but the resulting models are often complex and it is not known whether people can use them successfully. We investigate the trade-off between simplicity and complexity in decision making, testing diagrams tailored to target choices (Experiments 1 and 2), and with relevant causal paths highlighted (Experiment 3), finding that simplicity or directing attention to simple causal paths leads to better decisions. We test the boundaries of this effect (Experiment 4), finding that including a small amount of information beyond that related to the target answer has a detrimental effect. Finally, we examine whether people know what information they need (Experiment 5). We find that simple, targeted, information still leads to the best decisions, while participants who believe they do not need information or seek out the most complex information performed worse.
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This content will become publicly available on August 11, 2026
Causal information changes how we reason: a mixed-methods analysis of decision-making with causal information
Causal information, from health guidance on diets that prevent disease to financial advice for growing savings, is everywhere. Psychological research has shown that people can readily use causal information to make decisions and choose interventions. However, this work has mainly focused on novel systems rather than everyday domains, such as health and finance. Recent research suggests that in familiar scenarios, causal information can lead to worse decisions than having no information at all, but the mechanism behind this effect is not yet known. We aimed to address this by studying whether people reason differently when they receive causal information and whether the type of reasoning affects decision quality. For a set of decisions about health and personal finance, we used quantitative (e.g., decision accuracy) and qualitative (e.g., free-text descriptions of decision processes) methods to capture decision quality and how people used the provided information. We found that participants given causal information focused on different aspects than did those who did not receive causal information and that reasoning linked to better decisions with no information was associated with worse decisions with causal information. Furthermore, people brought in many aspects of their existing knowledge and preferences, going beyond the conclusions licensed by the provided information. Our findings provide new insights into why decision quality differs systematically between familiar and novel scenarios and suggest directions for future work guiding everyday choices.
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- PAR ID:
- 10649517
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Cognition
- Volume:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2813-4532
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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