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Abstract

Can variability across people in decision making be characterized by referring to idiosyncrasies in decision heuristics? A great deal of previous research tested relatively complicated models making several assumptions about cognitive mechanisms and their interaction. In contrast, we examine the idea that participants use comparatively simple heuristics to choose between options in a two-armed bandit task. Idiosyncratic decision heuristics explained the data almost as well as a benchmark model quipped with three previously suggested exploration strategies. We included information about the response history in a given trial into the set of variables available for a heuristic. Almost two thirds of the participants relied on these sequential variables. Closer inspection of their decision heuristics allows us to re-interpret exploration strategies as relatively short deterministic sequential response patterns.