Making Better Decisions

I was looking at Scientific American's web site last week, and happened to see one of their 60-Second Psych podcasts under the title Making a Decision? Take Your Time. The subheading provides the succint re-cap:

"A recent study shows that when faced with a decision, it's best to take some time-- relax and cool off-- so logical thinking can guide us to the best choice."


The podcast itself goes on to do a reasonably good job of summarizing the findings of a Maastricht University study where researchers took 168 students, grouped them into randomly assigned pairs, and then set them up to play the Ultimatum Game. The students were told they would be offered 10 euros, and that one of them would be assigned to split the money, while the second player would choose whether or not to accept the split. If the second player rejected the split, neither player would get any money from the game.


When researchers gave the students time between the offer and the decision to accept or reject, students were more likely to accept small offers than they were if they made the decision immediately.


The study itself was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the discussion that followed the summary on Scientific American, where it sparked a debate on whether students who decided to take the smaller amount of money after a delay had really made a better decision than students who had rejected the offer. The re-cap definitely implies that the better choice is to accept the small offers, which offended my sense of fair play. But some readers considered a 1-2 euro offer to be anti-social as well as selfish, making rejection of such an offer a more socially responsible choice. That rationale hadn't occured to me. It makes a lot of sense to avoid rewarding undesirable behaviors.

What do you think? Does delaying decisions make for better decisions or just more practical decisions?