Having Too Many Choices Leads To Bad, Risky Decisions
Las Vegas Wikimedia CommonsGiving subjects lots of ways to gamble turns them into risk-takers. You'd think having options is almost always a good thing. After all, more choices means more information: all the better for making a decision. Except not really, researchers behind a new study say. In fact, given too many choices, you're more likely to make a risky decision. A team from the University of Warwick and the University of Lugano set up a decision-making test with one of the age-old media of bad decisions: gambling. Each person in a group of 64 participants chose a box out of several boxes shown on a computer screen. The box could pay out a certain amount of money--1 British pound, or maybe 5 pounds--and had certain odds of paying out. So, for example, a 5-pound box may have had 1:3 odds of giving up the cash. The subjects could...