The Effect Of Attention Level Of Information On Heuristic Social Decision Making

Decision making is an important part in people's daily life, as well as an important subject under discussion in social cognition. To the social beings, it is impractical to adopt an exhaustive strategy in decision making. Consequently, people often, under uncertain conditions, take heuristics as the rule of decision making.One noticeable characteristic of social decision making is the indirectness of information-processing, i.e. the materials used in the information processing come mainly from the processing result of social perception and social impression (social memory). Attention is the first step in the information processing of human brain. As a regulation mechanism of mental activities, attention has already become an important subject in cognition psychology. It has an extensive influence upon social judgement and decision making.Taking the undergraduates as participants, the research, through six successive experiments, has inquired into the influence of the three attention levels of information (focused attention, divided attention and non-attention) upon the heuristic social decision making in the three types of tasks (choice, memory, estimate of quantity and frequency) in decision making. And, by taking account of the different effects, such as mere exposure, priming of experience, illusory correlation, self-relevance, the research has taken a further step and made a quite comprehensive study on the effect and existing biases in using heuristic decision making at different attention levels. The result of the research indicates that:(1) As far as the tasks of the three types of social decision i.e. choice, memory, estimate of quantity and frequency are concerned, the influence of attention level of information on the heuristic decision making has consistency as well as discrepancy. Generally speaking, biases are liable to exist in the heuristic decision of divided attention level, while biases resulted from the heuristic decision making of focused and non-attention level decrease in varying degrees.(2) The attention level of information interacts with such factors as the participants' gender, mere exposure, priming of experience, having feedback information or not, the abundance or shortage of information, self-relevance, etc., in a complex manner with different orientations and varying degrees, and thus has influence upon the heuristic socialdecision making. The influence of attention level upon heuristic decision making may vary due to the existence of other factors, but, to a certain extent, it remains stable and will not fade away. The existence and effect of other factors depend on some conditions.Based on the above information, we can come to such conclusions: on the one hand, by improving the attention level of information, we can reduce or even eliminate the biases or errors resulted from heuristic social decision making; on the other hand, the heuristics based on ignorance may also make the right judgement and decision making when there is a severe shortage of information. This will help people make reasonable decisions according to the actual situations in their life.