Satisficing decision making under anxiety

Critical real-life choices involve making complex decisions in the presence of potential threats, for instance, in medical or military emergencies. Effective choices require a decision maker to efficiently weigh and combine multiple sources of uncertain information. As anxiety can disrupt cognitive performance, complex decision-making under uncertainty may be particularly compromised by potential threat. One way people overcome such cognitive limitations is to “satisfice” by selectively evaluating a subset of available information to quickly identify a goodenough, feasible solution. How satisficing decision-making plays out under anxiety, however, remains elusive. Here, we examined how healthy participants solve a multi-cue probabilistic classification task under anticipatory anxiety induced via a threat-of-shock manipulation. Specifically, we investigated individual differences in information (cue) usage based on participants’ physiological responsiveness to threat, quantified by changes in skin conductance levels. In the absence of threat, all participants performed near-optimally, appropriately weighing and integrating all available cue information to guide their choices. Under threat-of-shock, however, participants who displayed high levels of anxiety employed a satisficing heuristic by ignoring the least important cue from their decision process, a strategy that uses less cognitive resources without sacrificing much accuracy. Moreover, anticipatory anxiety uncoupled the actual cue usage from explicit task knowledge. Taken together, these results suggest that, to cope with high levels of anticipatory anxiety, people satisfice by prioritizing high-value information to achieve fast and good-enough solutions.