Never Gonna Give You Up Even When It Is Suboptimal

Abstract

Previous research showed that animals adopt different foraging strategies in different environment settings. However, research on whether humans adapt their foraging strategies to the foraging environment has shown little evidence of a change in strategies. This study aims to investigate whether humans will adapt their foraging strategies when performance differences between strategies are large and why participants may fixate on a single strategy. We conducted two foraging experiments and identified the strategies used by the participants. Most participants used the Give-Up Time (GUT) strategy regardless of the environment they encountered. GUT was used even in environments where other strategies such as the Fixed-Time strategy or the Fixed-Number strategy performed better. Using computer simulations, we further examined the conditions under which the GUT strategy will perform well compared to the other strategies. We found that even though the GUT strategy is not always the best strategy, it performs consistently on a satisfactory level and had an advantage when variance in the quality of patches was introduced. The consistently good performance of the GUT strategy could thus explain participants’ lack of strategy switching.