Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human decision-making is filled with numerous paradoxes and violations of rationality principles. A particularly notable example is violation of cumulative independence (VoCI). Recently, there has been a surge of interest in theorizing and developing a resource-rational foundation for many such phenomena. Here we ask whether VoCI could be given a resource-rational basis too. To what extent could VoCI be explained in terms of the optimal use of limited cognitive resources? In this work, we look at VoCI through the lens of modern psychological theories of bounded rationality, presenting the first resource rational account of VoCI.We discuss the implications of our work for risky decision-making, and more broadly, human rationality.