I wonder if one can connect this suggested outcome with the old always go with your first intuition on multiple choice questions.
One aspect to getting answers here seems like it would be about how much is our decision-making about existing preconceptions and biases we carry around and how much might be related to things we actually know but do not keep front of mind or articulate to ourselves while thinking.
“Always go with your first intuition on multiple choice” reflects advice that’s specifically good for students who are anxious because they’re taking a test. The student will generally select the correct answer (or at least the one that’s most likely to be correct). If they’re somewhat uncertain about it, they’ll then start to feel anxious; this anxiety will build over time, resulting in a more and more pessimistic assessment of how likely they are to be correct, resulting in even more anxiety. This continues until the student is either sufficiently pessimistic to think that the original answer was not the best or else changes it simply to relieve the stress. This happens even though no new information has been received, implying said change is unlikely to be correlated with correctness and more likely simply reflects a failure of human psychology.
In short, a test is an especially bad test case (pun fully intended) for this because the amount of bias being introduced increases over time with anxiety, rather than decreasing.
It also might be advice for timed tests—even if the probability of the getting the question right increases after being scrutinized more closely, doing that before answering all the questions might not be the strategy with the highest expected score—if the increase in time taken doesn’t result in an increase in expected score greater than answering an additional question, then opportunity cost may be too high.*
*This may rely on all questions having equal value.
I wonder if one can connect this suggested outcome with the old always go with your first intuition on multiple choice questions.
One aspect to getting answers here seems like it would be about how much is our decision-making about existing preconceptions and biases we carry around and how much might be related to things we actually know but do not keep front of mind or articulate to ourselves while thinking.
“Always go with your first intuition on multiple choice” reflects advice that’s specifically good for students who are anxious because they’re taking a test. The student will generally select the correct answer (or at least the one that’s most likely to be correct). If they’re somewhat uncertain about it, they’ll then start to feel anxious; this anxiety will build over time, resulting in a more and more pessimistic assessment of how likely they are to be correct, resulting in even more anxiety. This continues until the student is either sufficiently pessimistic to think that the original answer was not the best or else changes it simply to relieve the stress. This happens even though no new information has been received, implying said change is unlikely to be correlated with correctness and more likely simply reflects a failure of human psychology.
In short, a test is an especially bad test case (pun fully intended) for this because the amount of bias being introduced increases over time with anxiety, rather than decreasing.
It also might be advice for timed tests—even if the probability of the getting the question right increases after being scrutinized more closely, doing that before answering all the questions might not be the strategy with the highest expected score—if the increase in time taken doesn’t result in an increase in expected score greater than answering an additional question, then opportunity cost may be too high.*
*This may rely on all questions having equal value.