Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Difficult tasks should be attempted one at a time, while easytasks can be undertaken in parallel. Reinforcing our previ-ous conclusion that people are surprisingly poor at applyingthis logic, we find people fail to select standing positions thatmaximize their probability of success in throwing a beanbaginto one of two possible hoops. We asked participants to ex-plicitly report their odds of successfully throwing a beanbaginto each hoop from the location they had chosen to stand,and estimates were highly accurate. Nonetheless, participantsfailed to use estimates of success appropriately to maximizesuccess, suggesting a failure of insight, rather than limited orinaccurate information, can account for suboptimal decisionsabout standing position.