{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.014354066985645933, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.434615384615385, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What's in the Adaptive Toolbox and How Do People Choose From It? Rational Models of Strategy Selection in Risky Choice

Although process data indicate that people often rely on simplifying processes when choosing between risky options, current models of heuristics cannot predict people’s choices very accurately. To address this apparent paradox, it has been proposed that people might adaptively choose from a toolbox of simple strategies. But which strategies are contained in this toolbox? And how do people decide when to use which decision strategy? Here, we develop a model according to which the decision maker selects a decision strategy for a given choice problem rationally from a toolbox of strategies; the content of the toolbox is estimated for each individual decision maker. Using cross-validation on an empirical data set, we find that this model of strategy selection from a personal adaptive toolbox predicts people’s choices better than any single strategy (even when it is allowed to vary across participants) and better than previously proposed toolbox models. Our model comparisons show that both inferring the content of the toolbox and rational strategy selection are critical for accurately predicting people’s risky choices. Furthermore, our analysis reveals considerable individual differences in the set of strategies people are equipped with and how they choose among them; these individual differences could partly explain why some people make better choices than others. These findings represent an important step towards a complete formalization of the notion that people select their cognitive strategies from a personal adaptive toolbox.