Holistic Information Integration in Child Decision Making

Weighted-additive (WADD) strategies require decision makers to integrate multiple values weighted by their relevance. From what age can children make choices in line with such a WADD-strategy? We compare multi-attribute decisions of children (6-7; 8-10; 11-12-year-olds) with adults in an open information-board environment without pre-decisional information search. In two experiments, we classify decision strategies based on individual choice patterns and find that in all age groups the majority of participants are users of a WADD-strategy. Simple decision heuristics such as lexicographic strategies were applied rarely by children and not at all by adults. In two additional follow-up studies, we further investigate the underlying process of WADD-application by analysing decision latencies in combination with a retrospective think-aloud study. Results suggest that children did not apply WADD-strategies in a deliberate fashion in our experiments. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the ability to make good and quick decisions by holistically integrating information is already present in young children. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.