# The role of framing, agency and uncertainty in a focus-divide dilemma

## TL;DR

People make better decisions in a resource allocation task when outcomes are uncertain, suggesting uncertainty encourages exploration of alternatives.

## Contribution

A new experimental paradigm using a fire truck parking task reveals how uncertainty affects decision-making in a focus-divide dilemma.

## Key findings

- Participants approached optimal strategies in the fire truck task but not in previous abstract versions.
- Uncertainty in outcomes led to more variable decisions, indicating increased exploration.
- Framing and agency had no significant effect on strategic choices.

## Abstract

How to prioritise multiple objectives is a common dilemma of daily life. A simple and effective decision rule is to focus resources when the tasks are difficult, and divide when tasks are easy. Nonetheless, in experimental paradigms of this dilemma, participants make highly variable and suboptimal strategic decisions when asked to allocate resources to two competing goals that vary in difficulty. We developed a new version in which participants had to choose where to park a fire truck between houses of varying distances apart. Unlike in the previous versions of the dilemma, participants approached the optimal strategy in this task. Three key differences between the fire truck version and previous versions of the task were investigated: (1) Framing (whether the objectives are familiar or abstract), by comparing a group who placed cartoon trucks between houses to a group performing the same task with abstract shapes; (2) Agency (how much of the task is under the participants’ direct control), by comparing groups who controlled the movement of the truck to those who did not; (3) Uncertainty, by adding variability to the driving speed of the truck to make success or failure on a given trial more difficult to predict. Framing and agency did not influence strategic decisions. When adding variability to outcomes, however, decisions shifted away from optimal. The results suggest choices become more variable when the outcome is less certain, consistent with exploration of response alternatives triggered by an inability to predict success.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-023-01484-6.