Teaching children to take the best

Abstract

“Take The Best” is a fast and frugal strategy that requires focus upon the most important information dimensions when making decisions, and the ability to ignore other, less crucial factors. Two studies are used to investigate whether children take up the Take The Best heuristic following child-friendly strategy prompting. The results show that children aged nine (Study 1, N = 65) and 12 (Study 2, N = 35) can accurately execute such a strategy and align their choices to strategy predictions instantly following prompts. This leads to better decision outcomes. However, strategy uptake is not perfect: a proportion of children do not apply the strategy systematically, and their choices are biased by irrelevant information. The results demonstrate that effortless strategy prompting can instantly improve a child's decision making.

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