With age your decision making skills get worse, according to a new study done by the University of Waterloo. The study suggests that younger children tend to make better decisions than their older counterparts.
The more years the children gain, the more likely they are to ignore some of the information that they should consider before making decisions, which obviously leads to making mistakes when making important judgements.
Stephanie Denison, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology said, “It is good for us to know that kids at different ages don’t necessarily treat all information similarly when we set out to teach them new things.”
“Children maybe aren’t taking all the information we are giving them at face value. They may be thinking about it in their own way and using the data in the way they think makes the most sense, which is important for parents and teachers to understand,” said Samantha Gualtieri, PhD student and co-author of the study.
“Our research shows that children around four-years-old are starting to use these shortcuts, but by six-years of age they’re using them at levels as high as adults, ” she added.
Researchers worked with 288 children to see how they reached the decisions they make- whether they use numerical, social, or both these types of information when they have to make decisions. They conducted two experiments to find this.
Results indicated that younger children made better decisions because they think thoroughly about both- the social and numerical aspects- before making a judgement- with nearly ninety-five percent children considering only the social information compared to seventy percent of 5-years old and 45 percent of the four-year-olds.
The research team does not think that older children giving much consideration to social information is bad news, it just reflects how children take the information available into consideration when they are making decisions.
Often adults also do not tend to utilize all the information that is available when they are trying to make better decisions. This may be because decision making does indeed require a lot of time and mental energy.
“So, while using these shortcuts is actually very efficient, we need to be aware that they can introduce errors,” explained Denison. “Therefore, sometimes we should be thinking harder and taking the time to put together all of the information.
“How much time you spend on processing information might depend on the importance of the judgement or the decision you’re making. So, thinking about where you want to spend the time is really important.”