Leveraging artificial intelligence to improve people's planning strategies.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Published Date:

Abstract

SignificanceMany bad decisions and their devastating consequences could be avoided if people used optimal decision strategies. Here, we introduce a principled computational approach to improving human decision making. The basic idea is to give people feedback on how they reach their decisions. We develop a method that leverages artificial intelligence to generate this feedback in such a way that people quickly discover the best possible decision strategies. Our empirical findings suggest that a principled computational approach leads to improvements in decision-making competence that transfer to more difficult decisions in more complex environments. In the long run, this line of work might lead to apps that teach people clever strategies for decision making, reasoning, goal setting, planning, and goal achievement.

Authors

  • Frederick Callaway
    Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540.
  • Yash Raj Jain
    Rationality Enhancement Group, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
  • Bas van Opheusden
    Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540.
  • Priyam Das
    Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100.
  • Gabriela Iwama
    Rationality Enhancement Group, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
  • Sayan Gul
    Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650.
  • Paul M Krueger
    Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
  • Frederic Becker
    Rationality Enhancement Group, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
  • Thomas L Griffiths
    Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
  • Falk Lieder
    Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany. falk.lieder@tuebingen.mpg.de.