How Past Experiences Impact Decision-Making

Learn how past experiences can affect decision-making and how to develop effective strategies and skills for it. Understand the factors that influence decision-making and how heuristics can lighten the burden of decision makers.

How Past Experiences Impact Decision-Making

Decision-making is a critical factor in feeling successful and happy in life, and it is essential to develop effective strategies and skills for it. There are many factors that influence decision-making, such as past experiences, cognitive biases, individual differences, and belief in personal purpose. Heuristics are mental shortcuts that lighten the burden of decision makers. After a decision is made, there can be various outcomes, including regrets and satisfaction.

Past experiences can have a significant impact on future decision-making. Juliusson, Karlsson and Garling (200) found that past decisions can influence future decisions. People tend to repeat decisions that had positive outcomes, while avoiding those that had negative outcomes (Sagi & Friedland, 200). However, this does not necessarily mean that decisions based on past experiences are the best ones.

Highly successful people often make financial decisions without considering past experiences. Episodic sampling is a powerful choice mechanism since it allows past experience to be generalized to novel situations. Memory probes do not affect incremental RL since they do not provide a relevant direct reward experience that can be used to update the average execution values of slot machines. In the luxury product and service segments, the consumer experience is the vital ingredient for success.

For Experiment 1, the expression contains four nested sums which correspond to the reward sampled for each bandit. The instinctive group was given five seconds to see the bag and told to base their decisions solely on the first impression, while the analytical group was told to ignore any instincts and to base their decision on careful observation.