Lifespan Development of Decision Making

Throughout the lifespan—but especially during sensitive developmental periods in childhood and adolescence—individuals’ cognition, emotion regulation, and decision making are shaped by their experiences with the world around them. We study how everyday environments and social relationships support learning and decision-making strategies across development, and how young people adapt to uncertainty as they grow.

The Statistics of Experience Across Development 

People’s experiences—and what they learn from them—shape how they think, act, and interact with the world. This is especially true during childhood and adolescence, when the scope for independent decision-making is constantly changing. Adolescents, for instance, will develop a stronger tendency to take risks when previous episodes of risk-taking resulted in positive outcomes.

Our research explores how and why early experiences have such lasting effects. We argue that the “long reach of childhood” arises from how the brain experiences and adapts to statistical patterns in the environment—such as how often taking a risk has a positive or a negative outcome. Early contexts help calibrate people’s sense of what is safe or risky, whom to trust, how much effort to invest in specific goals, where to direct their attention, and how to regulate their impulses.

To understand these processes, we study how the opportunities and constraints people encounter in different environments change across development—and how those changes influence the decisions they make. Using a combination of computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, we examine how early experiences shape later preferences and habits. We also investigate how individuals adapt their search and learning strategies in response to prior experiences. Our goal is to identify when early adaptations continue to serve people well—and when they become mismatched as people grow and their environments change.

The Developmental Roots of Decision Making under Uncertainty

Will someone live a better life if they quit college and start a band or a software company? Probably not, though it is impossible to say for certain. Every decision people make involves uncertainty; nobody can ever be entirely sure how things will turn out. While this holds for adults and children alike, younger people face an additional challenge: Many of the situations they encounter are new to them, meaning that they need to make decisions without the benefit of prior experience. We examine how the strategies that children and adolescents use to manage uncertainty differ from those that adults use, how these strategies change across development, and what these changes reveal about the challenges the developing mind seeks to solve.

Generally, as their cognitive abilities develop, children and adolescents approach decisions with uncertain outcomes more flexibly and adjust their decision strategies to specific problems. Adolescents, for instance, are notoriously susceptible to peer influence. Yet observing their peers can also be an adaptive strategy, guiding their choices when there is uncertainty about the right decision. By understanding how strategy use develops in tandem with changes in the decision environment, we aim to identify ways to help young people make sound decisions and navigate the challenges of uncertainty as they transition to adulthood.

The Development of Deliberate Ignorance

Children often seem to have a tireless thirst for knowledge, eagerly exploring the world around them and constantly asking “why.” And for good reason: Children need to learn a great deal about the world to function adaptively in it. At some point during development, however, people realize that there are some things they would rather not know—be it mundane information, such as movie spoilers, or more serious matters, like their genetic risks for serious illnesses. 

We investigate how children move from being endlessly curious to recognizing that some knowledge can entail psychological costs—and sometimes preferring to remain ignorant. Choosing not to know can be beneficial: It can shield your emotions, free up mental energy, add a bit of surprise and suspense to life, and make it easier to treat others fairly. But engaging in deliberate ignorance requires certain cognitive abilities, such as metacognition, emotion regulation, and the capacity to project oneself into the future. When children decide not to peek inside a present, for example, they are using deliberate ignorance to save the surprise for later, demonstrating an ability to regulate their curiosity and predict their own emotions. Examining human development through the lens of deliberate ignorance offers a new perspective on why children’s curiosity tends to decrease as they grow older. 

Evolutionary and Developmental Roots of Decision Making

Uncertainty is central to every adaptive decision that human and nonhuman animals make, including choosing where to forage, selecting a mate, and dealing with dangerous situations. We study the evolutionary and developmental roots of human risk preferences, reasoning, and decision making by comparing humans to other animals—mainly chimpanzees, humans’ closest living relatives—and by investigating how children develop in different societies.

References

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