Distinguishing between intrinsic and instrumental sources of the value of choice

被引：1

作者：

Devine, Sean ^{[1
]}

Castanheira, Kevin da Silva ^{[1
]}

Fleming, Stephen M. ^{[2
,3
,4
]}

Otto, A. Ross ^{[1
]}

机构：

[1] McGill Univ, Dept Psychol, Montreal, PQ, Canada

[2] UCL, Dept Expt Psychol, London, England

[3] UCL, Wellcome Ctr Human Neuroimaging, London, England

[4] UCL, Max Planck UCL Ctr Computat Psychiat & Ageing Res, London, England

来源：

COGNITION | 2024年 / 245卷

基金：

加拿大自然科学与工程研究理事会; 英国科研创新办公室;

关键词：

Value of choice; Decision-making; Agency; Mutual information; PREFERENCE; INFORMATION; SELECTION; CHOOSE;

D O I：

10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105742

中图分类号：

B84 [心理学];

学科分类号：

04 ; 0402 ;

摘要：

Considerable evidence suggests that people value the freedom to choose. However, it is unclear whether this preference for choice stems purely from choice's intrinsic value, or whether people prefer to choose because it tends to provide instrumental information about desirable outcomes. To address this question, participants completed a novel choice task in which they could freely choose to exert choice or not, manipulating the level of instrumental contingency between participants' choices and eventual outcomes, which we operationalized using the information-theoretic concept of mutual information. Across two experiments (N = 100 each), we demonstrate a marked preference for choice, but importantly found that participants' preference for free choice is weakened when actions are decoupled from outcomes. Taken together, our results demonstrate that a significant factor in people's preference for choice is an assumption about the instrumental value of choice, suggesting against a purely intrinsic value of choice.

引用

页数：10