Why do people pursue goals sequentially when they try to balance cost and utility?

Abstract

While research in Cognitive Psychology has investigated people’s ability to use feedback to pursue a single goal, little research has addressed their ability to use feedback to pursue multiple goals. We investigated the reasons for the sequential goal pursuit observed in previous research using a multiple-cue-probability learning task aiming at teaching energy efficiency, specifically, if it derives from cognitive constraints. The task was to balance utility (comfort) against cost, with an explicit budget for both variables (Experiment 1); with utility expressed in an accessible unit (Experiment 2); and with utility represented by a linear function (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the sequential goal pursuit behaviour is driven by limits on cognitive capacity that are little affected by training and goal phrasing. One cognitive constraint was the difficulty with interpreting the effect of actions on the nonlinear utility, which reinforced an initial priority assigned to actions on the linear cost.

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