Time to decide: Diurnal variations on the speed and quality of human decisions

LEONE, JULIANA; FERNÁNDEZ SLEZAK, DIEGO; GOLOMBEK, DIEGO; SIGMAN, MARIANO

Cognition

ELSEVIER

Año: 2017 vol. 158 p. 44 - 55

0010-0277

Human behavior and physiology exhibit diurnal fluctuations. These rhythms are entrained by light andsocial cues, with vast individual differences in the phase of entrainment - referred as an individual?schronotype - ranging in a continuum between early larks and late owls. Understanding whetherdecision-making in real-life situations depends on the relation between time of the day and anindividual?s diurnal preferences has both practical and theoretical implications. However, answering thisquestion has remained elusive because of the difficulty of measuring precisely the quality of a decision inreal-life scenarios. Here we investigate diurnal variations in decision-making as a function of anindividual?s chronotype capitalizing on a vast repository of human decisions: online chess servers. In achess game, every player has to make around 40 decisions using a finite time budget and both the timeand quality of each decision can be accurately determined. We found reliable diurnal rhythms in activityand decision-making policy. During the morning, players adopt a prevention focus policy (slower andmore accurate decisions) which is later modified to a promotion focus (faster but less accurate decisions),without daily changes in performance.