Why Do People Keep Making Bad Decisions?

Clinicians regularly encounter patients who remain in situations and relationships with ongoing adverse consequences. To study decision making in the face of diminishing returns, researchers used an experimental model: a computer task of harvesting apples from virtual orchards.

The 65 healthy volunteer participants were paid for each apple harvested and had to decide between continuing to harvest apples from orchards that had fewer apples as time went on and spending the time to move to a new orchard. Performance in the absence of stress was compared with performance after an acute stress (hand immersion in ice water, confirmed by salivary cortisol levels) or in relation to chronic stress over the past month, as self-reported on a validated …