Decision-making psychology and method under zero-knowledge context

Sci Rep. 2022 Feb 24;12(1):3187. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-06753-z.

Abstract

For a certain kind of decision event, the decision maker does not know the internal mechanism and knowledge information of the decision events.When this kind of decision events gives multiple selection branches, it is found that there is a decision psychological tendency to find the most common features by comparing the selection branches. Based on this, a zero-knowledge decision making (ZKDM) method is proposed. By defining the feature points and feature sets of the selection branches of the decision events, the characteristic moments of the system are constructed and the branch with the most common characteristics is obtained. It is observed that through the findings of investigation the probability of arriving at the correct choice based on the ZKDM method is high. The effectiveness of the ZKDM method may be related to the fact that the designers of decision events usually determine the correct selection branch first, before changing it to design other branches. A questionnaire survey of 279 respondents reveals that more than half of them actually adopt such a design idea. Furthermore, a separate questionnaire survey of 465 decision-makers reveal that 19.14% of the respondents clearly adopt ZKDM.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Choice Behavior
  • Decision Making*
  • Humans
  • Intuition
  • Knowledge
  • Psychophysics / methods*
  • Surveys and Questionnaires