The work could open up opportunities to study internal conflict, but it also shows just how careful we need to be about who gets to track our online activity. By tracking their participants' mouse movements, the authors gained insight into the journey, as well as the eventual destination. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there has been little research into how people make these decisions, including how torn they feel. Whether the participants moved the cursor straight to their eventual target or took a roundabout route proved highly predictive of how they would respond in later tests – much more so than traditional measures such as the time required to make a decision.Īs the authors note, countless psychological studies have shown most people are both loss-averse (finding the pain of losing greater than the joy of winning) and risk-averse (valuing a $10 win less than twice a $5 one). In others, the choice was between a guaranteed small reward and an equal chance of getting more or nothing. Some rounds offered a 50/50 chance of gaining or losing money, compared to a neutral outcome. In 215 trials they were then presented with two choices, with the safe option at the top left, and the risky one in the upper right. The team had participants place their cursor at the bottom center of the screen. “It is rare to get predictive accuracy with just a single decision in an experiment like this." "In many cases, we could accurately predict how people would behave in the future after we observed them just once choosing to take a gamble or not," said Stillman's supervisor Dr Ian Krajbich. Not surprisingly, these people were far more likely to opt for a risky choice in future than those who went straight to their eventual destination. For example, those who were sorely tempted by the high-risk option would often move their cursor towards it, before eventually settling on the safe path. "We could see the conflict people were feeling making the choice through their hand movements with the mouse," Stillman said in a statement. “Choice is not a discrete event, but rather the output of a dynamic cognitive process, which is reflected in motor movement,” Stillman and colleagues wrote in their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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