Choosing fast and slow: explaining differences between hedonic and utilitarian choices

Abstract

This paper examines the psychological differences between hedonic and utilitarian patterns of preference behavior. In-stead of using latent variables like self-control and emotion to explain these differences, we show that they emerge as nat-ural consequences of solving two different, but related prob-lems within an inductive framework of preference learning. We show that hedonic decisions involve tracking the variabil-ity of a binary variable, whereas utilitarian decisions require the maintenance of a distribution over a vector of object labels. Computational experiments show that this difference in cogni-tive representation ensures that hedonic decisions have a lower cognitive sampling cost, which makes them less effortful. Fur-ther experiments reveal differences in error rates as a function of deliberative effort between the two paradigms. Deliberative effort benefits utilitarian choices, but not hedonic ones. Over-all, our work demonstrates the critical role of cognitive rep-resentations in extracting strikingly different behavior patterns from simple models of information processing.

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