The role of agency and uncertainty in prioritising decisions

Prioritising different objectives is a common dilemma of daily life. A simple and effective decision rule is to focus resources when the tasks are difficult, and divide when tasks are easy. Nonetheless, in experimental paradigms of this dilemma, participants make highly variable and suboptimal strategic decisions when asked to allocate resources to two competing goals that vary in difficulty. We developed a virtual dilemma in which participants had to choose where to park a fire truck between houses of varying distances apart. Unlike in the previous versions of the dilemma, participants approached the optimal strategy in this task. Three key differences between the virtual version and previous versions of the task were investigated: 1) Task framing (how concrete and important the objectives are); 2) Agency (not only making strategic choices about how to prioritise tasks, but also carrying out those tasks) and 3) Uncertainty (in the virtual version choice outcomes were more certain and more closely resembled a step function, while in previous versions success on each trial was a probability curve decreasing with difficulty). We found that making tasks more abstract and adding control over task execution to our virtual focus-divide dilemma did not worsen strategic decisions, suggesting framing and agency could not explain why participants are better at the virtual version. When adding variability to outcomes, however, decisions shifted away from optimal. The results suggest choices become more variable when the outcome is less certain, consistent with exploration of response alternatives triggered by an inability to predict success.