Ecological Rationality: Decision-making Environment For Decision-makers The Information Processing And Decision-making Strategies

According to the standpoint of the Theory of Ecological Rationality and process tracing, the research adopted the mouselab technique of the decision method to discuss the influence of the characteristics of the environment and the characteristics of the decision of task. Other research use the simple task and not suitable to reality, our research used more complicated decision task by increase the number of decision cues and control of the change of cues'weights. And we use the affair of consumption to realize the aim of close to real life.The first experiment mainly discusses the influence of decision environment on the change of decision strategy and the information process in decision. The result show that, the involvement of decision task and the decision cue information have the main effect on the option and decision time. In high task involvement and low reliability situation, more participants use compensatory strategy, but in low task involvement and high reliability situation, more participants use noncompensatory strategy.The second experiment mainly discusses the influence of the time pressure in open mouselab in which informations were openly presented in decision. The results indicate that individuals are able to compute weighted additive decision strategies extremely quickly if information search is not restricted by the experimental procedure. The result did not indicate the change form complex compensatory strategy to simple noncompensatory. There was a kind of automatic process in decision. We use the standard mouselab, in the third experiment, in which the information can't be inspected simultaneously. And in the third experiment we manipulate the time pressure further to discuss the influence of decision environment. By analyses of the options, decision time and information-search parameters, we found that in lenient time limit condition the majority of participants used compensatory strategy. Under medium condition, some participants switched compensatory strategy to noncompensatory. Under sever condition, almost all the participants turned to noncompensatory, but no one used automatic strategy.The experiments results of the research support the Theory of Ecological Rationality which the decision environment can influence the decision process. In real environment human has to ignore some information or uses automatic process to adapt the complicate environment. And our results support the assumption of "deliberation-without-attention" or "Unconscious Thought". Furthermore, our results indicate that it has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones, this result not because of the limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information search imposed by the commonly used experimental tool Mouselab.In sum, the findings challenge the fundaments of bounded rationality and highlight the importance of automatic processes and fast and frugal heuristics in decision making.