Complex Decision-Making Under Threat

Research suggests that threat may disrupt complex decision-making. Nevertheless, findings are mixed, likely due to indirect, incidental experimental manipulations of threat, an overreliance on summative performance measures, and underexplored motivational influences. This thesis confronts these methodological and conceptual gaps. For my first empirical chapter, I developed and validated a virtual world to manipulate threat during a complex decision-making task. In this paradigm, threat was directly linked to decision-making (and not merely a distraction from the decision-making task). Participants performed worse under threat, taking longer to improve from baseline and scoring lower through the final trials. Moreover, computational modelling revealed that participants in the threat condition were more responsive to short-term rewards and less likely to perseverate on a given choice. In my next empirical chapter, we used an adapted probabilistic reversal learning task to examine decision-making under two specific forms of uncertainty: volatility and stochastic variability. Threat led to higher learning rates and inverse temperature estimates, indicating increased responsiveness to feedback and a greater tendency to exploit current beliefs. These two sets of studies suggest that contrary to the notion of threat rigidity, being under threat increases reward responsivity in ways that affect performance differently as a function of context. The final empirical chapter investigates the effect of evaluative threat on motivational factors relevant to complex decision-making. Specifically, I examined the effects of real-world military training on the motivation to engage with complexity. Results suggest that the evaluative nature of training might interfere with one’s willingness to deal with complexity. However, formative training can mitigate this risk, which may promote motivation to engage with uncertainty. Altogether, these findings help explain current contradictions in the literature. They furthermore offer a foundation for future work supporting individuals who must make difficult decisions within hazardous environments.