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Humans adjust their behavioral strategies to maximize rewards. However, in the laboratory, human decisional biases exist and persist in two alternative tasks, even when this behavior leads to a loss in utilities. Such biases constitute the tendency to choose one action over others and emerge from a combination of external and internal factors that are specific for each individual. Here, we explored the idea that internally-mediated decisional biases should stably occur and, hence, be reflected across multiple behavioral tasks. Our experimental results confirm this notion and illustrate how participants exhibited similar choice biases across days and tasks. Moreover, we show how side-choice behavior in a two alternative choice task served to identify participants, suggesting that individual traits could underlie these choice biases. The tasks and analytic tools developed for this study should become instrumental in exploring the interaction between internal and external factors that contribute to decisional biases. They could also serve to detect psychopathologies that involve aberrant levels of choice variability.

Original publication

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0245890

Type

Journal article

Journal

PLoS One

Publication Date

2021

Volume

16

Keywords

Adolescent, Adult, Choice Behavior, Decision Making, Female, Humans, Male, Perception, Psychomotor Performance, Young Adult