One frequent piece of advice is not to “put all our eggs in
one basket” and opt for multiple alternatives in order to minimize
risk and uncertainty in our decisions. In a behavioral
study involving decisions-from-experience, Ashby, Konstantinidis,
and Gonzalez (2015) showed that participants follow
an “irrational” strategy in choice selection which departs from
maximization. As structural complexity (number of available
options) increased, participants diversified their choices
more, proportional to rank ordering options based on their expected
value. The current work explores the underlying cognitive
mechanisms through a reinforcement-learning model and
shows that people’s choices can be explained by a singular
strategy (diversification in choice), which originates from similar
cognitive processes regardless of structural complexity