Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Making rational judgments is not always easy. Given that aggregation of the distributed labor force through Internet has become common, a simple and cost-effective solution is needed to improve worker performance. We tested the hypothesis that enforcing a certain decision time boosts job performance by not allowing workers to provide answers within a certain short time after presenting the task. We used the binary judgment tasks, and job performance with various enforced decision times were compared. Two behavioral experiments with physicians (N = 628) demonstrated that job performance was improved by enforcing a one-second decision time; this did not affect the cognitive load of physicians. Furthermore, it was suggested that adding a one-second decision time induced the optimal trade-off between the worker’s performance and cognitive load. Our results show that focusing on resource rationality could lead to simple and cost-effective solutions to real-world problems by boosting workers’ job performance.