I would argue that it might even be rational behaviour to “rush and try something stupid” if incentivised with a reward for being in the top 5% of participants. If your choices are between a method that may not work (pick a random method that just might work) but if it does work is fast and a method that is guaranteed to work (such as thinking it through deeply) but is slow then you just might maximise your expected earnings by doing the fast-but-risky approach.
Even more so, if you don’t think you’re in the smartest 5% of the group then you are pretty much guaranteed to not get the reward if you go down the slow-and-steady path—you’d be dominated by the smartest 5% who do that, so you’re better off with a worse approach that has at least some chance of beating the group.
Simply put, for the majority of people I think the optimal strategy would be to try a risky move—and the case for this becomes stronger as the number of winners in a group decreases. Depending on how hard the task is, there are some people for whom the optimal strategy may be to think things through. Confidence may end up driving a large part of how people will navigate making that decision. Having an optimism bias (precisely, the belief that a great solution exists) in your decision-evaluations can sometimes be a great strategy as solutions that will likely not yield exceptional outcomes won’t even be evaluated.
Interesting write-up, thank you for sharing it!
I would argue that it might even be rational behaviour to “rush and try something stupid” if incentivised with a reward for being in the top 5% of participants. If your choices are between a method that may not work (pick a random method that just might work) but if it does work is fast and a method that is guaranteed to work (such as thinking it through deeply) but is slow then you just might maximise your expected earnings by doing the fast-but-risky approach.
Even more so, if you don’t think you’re in the smartest 5% of the group then you are pretty much guaranteed to not get the reward if you go down the slow-and-steady path—you’d be dominated by the smartest 5% who do that, so you’re better off with a worse approach that has at least some chance of beating the group.
Simply put, for the majority of people I think the optimal strategy would be to try a risky move—and the case for this becomes stronger as the number of winners in a group decreases. Depending on how hard the task is, there are some people for whom the optimal strategy may be to think things through. Confidence may end up driving a large part of how people will navigate making that decision. Having an optimism bias (precisely, the belief that a great solution exists) in your decision-evaluations can sometimes be a great strategy as solutions that will likely not yield exceptional outcomes won’t even be evaluated.