Distinguishing between Intrinsic and Instrumental Sources of the Value of Choice

Considerable evidence suggests that people value the freedom of choice. However, it is unclear whether this preference for choice stems purely from choice’s intrinsic value, or whether people prefer to choose because it tends to provide instrumental information about desirable outcomes. To address this question, we asked participants (n=200) to complete a two-stage choice task in which they could freely choose to exert choice or not. Borrowing a concept from information theory—mutual information—we manipulated the instrumental contingency between participants’ choices and eventual outcomes. Across two experiments, and leveraging reinforcement learning modeling, we demonstrate a marked preference for choice, but importantly found that participants’ preference for free choice is weakened when actions are decoupled from outcomes. Taken together, our results demonstrate that a significant factor in people’s preference for choice is an assumption about the instrumental value of choice, suggesting against a purely intrinsic value of choice.