The potential of waiting one second before answering a question for boosting medical image binary labelling performance

Given the now-commonplace aggregation of the online dispersed workforce following the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-effective solutions to improve human judgment are necessary. Referring to the framework of resource rationality, we hypothesized that when people take an appropriate length of time to make decisions, the trade-off between judgments’ accuracy and cognitive load can be balanced to improve job performance. Through a theoretical analysis, we confirmed the existence of a rational decision time that improved humans’ performance by balancing cognitive utility and cognitive frugality. Four behavioural experiments conducted in 2021 with 651 nurses (novices) and 628 medical doctors (semi-professionals), who are native speakers of Japanese, confirmed that job performance of binary labelling of medical images was at its peak when participants were forced to wait and prompted to think for 1.0 seconds, which was shorter than the median length of decision time without a forced wait, before answering a question independent of participants’ background knowledge without increasing cognitive load of participants who completed the tasks. Waiting for a rational short period of time before making decisions can be implemented in a cost-effective manner and can be applied to a wide variety of decision-making scenarios.