Influences of Complexity on Decision Making in Young and Older Adults

Stephen P Badham, Calum A Hamilton, Stephen P Badham, Calum A Hamilton

Abstract

Leading theory hypothesizes that age deficits in decision making may rise as the complexity of decision-related information increases. This suggests that older adults would benefit relative to young adults from simplification of information used to inform decision making. Participants indicated political, nutritional and medical preferences and then chose between politicians, foods and medicines. The amount of information presented was systematically varied but age differences were largely similar for simple and complex trials. Paradoxically, the data showed that decisions based on simpler information could be less aligned with participant's preferences than decisions based on more complex information. Further analyses suggested that participants may have been responding purely on the basis of their most valued preferences and that when information about those preferences was not presented, decision making became poorer. Contrary to our expectations, simplification of information by exclusion may therefore hinder decision making and may not particularly help older adults.

Keywords: aging; applied psychology; complexity; decision-making; executive functioning.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example of a complex trial in the political condition (top), the nutritional condition (middle) and the medical condition (bottom). Simple trials were presented identically but with items removed from each option. The participant must press 1 or 2 on the keyboard to indicate their choice of the left or right option. The traffic-light colors in parenthesis for the nutritional condition are displayed in text here but were the font colors in the original experiment.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Proportion of accurate responses (.5 = chance) for young and older adults when making complex and simple decisions based on their political (A) nutritional (B) and medical (C) preferences. Error bars are ± 1SE.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Proportion of accurate responses (.5 = chance) for young and older adults based on original scoring or single-dimensional (SD) scoring. The x-axis shows the decision types in order of the number of attributes (indicated in parentheses) involved in each decision. Error bars are ± 95% CI.

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