One and Done? Optimal Decisions From Very Few Samples
Edward Vul (evul@mit.edu)

Noah D. Goodman (ndg@mit.edu)

Brain and Cognitive Science, 43 Vassar St
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

Brain and Cognitive Science, 43 Vassar St
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

Thomas L. Griffiths (tom griffiths@berkeley.edu)

Joshua B. Tenenbaum (jbt@mit.edu)

Dept. of Psychology, Tolman Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720 USA

Brain and Cognitive Science, 43 Vassar St
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

Abstract
In many situations human behavior approximates that of a
Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, anumber of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch
between human behavior and that predicted by Bayesian inference: people often appear to make judgments based on a few
samples from a probability distribution, rather than the full distribution. Although sample-based approximations are a common implementation of Bayesian inference, the very limited
number of samples used by humans seems to be insufficient
to approximate the required probability distributions. Here we
consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: if people were making decisions based on samples, but samples were costly, how many
samples should people use? We find that under reasonable assumptions about how long it takes to produce a sample, locallysuboptimal decisions based on few samples are globally optimal. These results reconcile a large body of work showing
sampling, or probability-matching, behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition is well described as Bayesian inference, and suggest promising future directions for studies ofresource-constrained cognition.
Keywords: Computational modeling; Bayesian models; Process models; Sampling

Across a wide range of tasks, people seem to act in a manner consistent with optimal Bayesian models (in perception:
Knill & Richards, 1996; motor action: Maloney, Trommershauser, & Landy, 2007; language: Chater & Manning, 2006;
decision making: McKenzie, 1994; causal judgments: Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2005; and concept learning: Goodman,
Tenenbaum, Feldman, & Griffiths, 2008). However, despite
this similarity between Bayesian ideal observers and humanobservers, two crucial problems remain unaddressed acrossthese domains. First, human behavior often appears to be
optimal on average, but not within individual people or individual trials: What are people doing on individual trails
to produce optimal behavior in the long-run average? Second, Bayesian inference is straight-forward when considering
small laboratory tasks, but intractable for large-scale problems like those that people face in the real world: How canpeople be carrying out generally intractable Bayesian calculations in real-world tasks? Here we will argue that both ofthese problems can be resolved by considering the algorithms
that people may be using to approximate Bayesian inference.
The first problem is highlighted by an intriguing observation from Goodman et al. (2008) about performance in categorization tasks in which people see positive and negative
exemplars of a category and are then asked to generalize any

learned rules to new test items. After exposure to several category exemplars people classify new test items consistently
with fully Bayesian inference, on average. This average behavior suggests that people consider many possible classification rules, update their beliefs about each one, and then classify new items by averaging the classification over all the possible rules. However, this perfectly Bayesian behavior is only
evident in the average across many observers. In contrast,
each individual classifies all test items in a manner consistent with only one or a few rules; which rules are consideredvaries from observer to observer according to the appropriate posterior probabilities (Goodman et al., 2008). Thus, it
seems that an individual observer acts based on just one ora few rules sampled from the posterior distribution, and thefully Bayesian behavior only emerges when averaging many
individuals, each with different sampled rules.
This sampling behavior is not limited to concept-learning
tasks. In many other high-level cognitive tasks, individuals’
patterns of response – and sometimes even responses on individual trials – appear to reflect just a small number of samples
from the posterior predictive distribution. When predicting
how long a cake will bake given that it has been in the oven for
45 minutes (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006), the across-subject
variance of responses is consistent with individuals guessing
based on only two prior observations of cake baking times(Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). When making estimatesof esoteric quantities in the world, multiple guesses from one
individual have independent error, like samples from a probability distribution (Vul & Pashler, 2008). In all of these cases(and others; e.g., Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007; Anderson, 1991;
Sanborn & Griffiths, 2008), people seem to sample instead ofcomputing the “fully Bayesian” answer.
Critics of the Bayesian approach (e.g., Mozer et al., 2008)
have suggested that although many samples may adequately
approximate Bayesian inference, behavior based on only afew samples is fundamentally inconsistent with the hypothesis that human cognition is Bayesian. Others highlight thesecond problem and argue that cognition cannot be Bayesianinference because exact Bayesian calculations are computationally intractable (e.g., Gigerenzer, 2008).
In this paper we will argue that acting based on a few samples can be easily reconciled with optimal Bayesian inference and may be the method by which people approximate
otherwise intractable Bayesian calculations. We argue that(a) sampling behavior can be understood in terms of sensible

sampling-based approaches to approximating intractable inference problems in Bayesian statistics and AI; (b) very few
samples from the Bayesian posterior are often sufficient toobtain approximate predictions that are almost as good as predictions computed using the full posterior; and (c) on conservative assumptions about how much time it might cost to produce a sample from the posterior, making predictions basedon very few samples (even just one), can actually be the globally optimal strategy.

Bayesian inference with samples
Bayesian probability theory prescribes a normative method to
combine information and make inferences about the world.
However, the claim that human cognition can be describedas Bayesian inference does not imply that people are doing
exact Bayesian inference.
Exact Bayesian inference amounts to fully enumerating
hypothesis spaces every time beliefs are updated with new
data. In any large-scale application, this is computationallyintractable, so inference must be approximate. This is thecase in “Bayesian” artificial intelligence and statistics, andthis must apply even more in human cognition, where thereal-world inferences are vastly more complex and responses
are time-sensitive. The need for approximating Bayesian inference leaves two important questions. For artificial intelligence and statistics: What kinds of approximation methods
work best to approximate Bayesian inference? For cognitive
science and psychology: What kinds of approximation methods does the human mind use?
In the tradition of rational analysis, or Marr’s computational approach (Marr, 1982), a reasonable strategy to answering the psychological question begins with good answers
to the engineering question. Thus, we will explore the hypothesis that the human mind approximates Bayesian inference with some version of the algorithmic strategies that have
proven best in AI and statistics, on the grounds of computational efficiency and accuracy.
In artificial intelligence and statistics, one of the most common methods for implementing Bayesian inference is withsample-based approximations. Inference by sampling is aprocedure to approximate a probability distribution by repeatedly simulating a simpler stochastic process which producesalternatives from a hypothesis space according to their probability under the distribution in question. The result of any one
such simulation is a sample. With sufficiently many samples,
these calculations based on these approximations approachthe exact calculations using the analytical probability distributions themselves1 . Sampling methods are typically usedbecause they are applicable to a large range of computational
1 The Monte Carlo theorem states that the expectation over aprobability distribution can be approximated from samples:1∑ f (Si ), when Si ∼ P(S).
k i=1

Bayesian and sample-based agents
To address the quality of decisions based on few samples,
we will consider performance of optimal (fully Bayesian)and sample-based agents in the common scenario of choosing between two alternatives. Many experimental tasks in
psychology are a variant of this problem: given everythinglearned, make a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) response. Moreover, real-world tasks often collapse onto such
simple 2AFC decisions, for instance: we must decide whether
to drive to the airport via the bridge or the tunnel, depending on which route is likely to have least traffic. Although
this decision will be informed by prior experiences that produced intricate cognitive representations of possible traffic
flow, at one particular junction these complex representations
collapse onto a prediction about a binary variable and decision: Should we turn left or right?
Statistical decision theory (Berger, 1985) prescribes how
information and beliefs about the world and possible rewards
should be combined to define a probability distribution overpossible payoffs for each available action (Maloney, 2002;
Kording, 2007; Yuille & Bülthoff, 1996). An agent trying
to maximize payoffs over many decisions should use these
normative rules to determine the expected payoff of each action, and choose the action with the greatest expected payoff2 .
Thus, the standard for decisions in statistical decision theory
is to choose the action (A∗ ) that will maximize expected utility under the posterior predictive distribution over possible
world states (S) given prior data (D), assuming that action
and state uniquely determine the utility obtained:A∗ = arg max ∑ U(A; S)P(S|D).
Ak

EP(S) [ f (S)] 'models and are more robust to increasing dimensionality thanother approximate methods.
Many cognitively plausible sampling algorithms exist andsome specific ones have been proposed to account for aspectsof human behavior (Griffiths, Canini, Sanborn, & Navarro,
2007; Levy, Reali, & Griffiths, 2009; Brown & Steyvers,
2008). For our purposes, we need only assume that a person has the ability to draw samples from the hypothesis spaceaccording to the posterior probability distribution. Thus, it isreasonable to suppose that people can approximate Bayesianinference via a sampling algorithm, and evidence that humans
make decisions by sampling is not in conflict with the hypothesis that the computations they are carrying out are Bayesian.
However, recent work suggests that people base their decisions on very few samples (Vul & Pashler, 2008; Goodman
et al., 2008; Mozer et al., 2008) – so few that any claims of
convergence to the real probability distribution do not hold.
Algorithms using only two samples (Mozer et al., 2008) will
have properties quite different from full Bayesian integration.
This leaves us with the question: How bad are decisions basedon few samples?

(1)

(2)

S

2 An agent might have other goals, e.g., maximizing the minimum possible payoff (i.e., extreme risk aversion); however, we will
not consider situations in which such goals are likely.

If the world state is sufficiently specified, 2AFC decisions
map onto a prediction about which of two actions (A1 and A2 )will have higher expected utility – for instance: will we spend
less time in traffic taking the bridge or the tunnel? Therefore, choosing among two alternatives amounts to predicting
the outcome of a Bernoulli trial: will A1 or A2 have greater
utility? Thus, P(A∗ = A1 ) ≡ p and P(A∗ = A2 ) ≡ (1 − p),and we can simply parameterize these decisions in terms of
the posterior predictive probability p. For simplicity, we willconsider choosing the higher-utility action a “correct” choice,and choosing the lower-utility action an “incorrect” choice.
The fully Bayesian agent will choose the more likely alternative, and will be correct p proportion of the time (we assume
p is between 0.5 and 1, given symmetry).
A sample-based agent would sample possible world states,
and make decisions based on those sampled world states (Sn ):kA∗ = arg max ∑ U(A; Si )
A

i=1

(3)

Si ∼ P(S|D),
so in the case of making predictions between two alternatives one of which may be correct, the sample-based agent
should choose the action corresponding to the most frequent
outcome in the set of sampled world states. Thus, a samplebased agent drawing k samples will choose a particular outcome with probability q:k(4)
q = 1 − ΘCDF ( , p, k),2where ΘCDF is the binomial cumulative density function andk/2 is rounded down to the nearest integer. This samplebased agent will be right with probability qp + (1 − q)(1 − p).

Good decisions from few samples

Figure 1: Increased error rate for the sample-based agent over the
optimal agent as a function of the Bernoulli trial probability andthe number of samples drawn for a decision (decisions based on 0
samples not shown).

So, how much worse will such 2AFC decisions be if they
are based on a few samples rather than the “fully Bayesian”

inference? Bernoulli estimated that more than 25,000 samples are required for “moral certainty about the true probability of a two-alternative event3 (Stigler, 1986). Although
Bernoulli’s calculations were based on different derivations
than those which are now accepted (Stigler, 1986), it is undeniable that inference based on a small number of samples
differs from the “fully Bayesian” solution and will containgreater errors, but how bad are the decisions based on thisinference?
In Figure 1 we plot the difference in error rates between
the sample-based and optimal agents as a function of the underlying probability (p) and number of samples (k). When p
is near 0.5, there is no use in obtaining any samples (since a
perfectly informed decision will be as likely to be correct asa random guess). When p is 1 (or close), there is much to begained from a single sample since that one sample will indicate the (nearly-deterministically correct) answer; however,subsequent samples are of little use, since the first one will
provide all the gain there is to be had. Most of the benefit oflarge numbers of samples occurs in interim probability values(around 0.7 and lower).

Figure 2: (a) The maximum and expected increase in error for the
sample-based agent compared to the optimal agent as a function of
number of samples (see text). (b) Expected and maximum gain in
accuracy from an additional sample as a function of the number ofsamples already obtained.

Since the sample-based agent does not know what the trueprobability p may be for a particular decision we can consider
the scenarios such an agent should expect: the average scenario (expectation over p) and the worst case scenario (maximization of the loss over p). These are displayed in Figure 2a
assuming a uniform probability distribution over p. The deviation from optimal performance decreases to negligible levels with very few samples, suggesting that the sample-based
agent need not have more than a few samples to approximate
ideal performance. We can go further to assess just how muchis gained (in terms of decreased error rate) from an additional
sample (Figure 2b). Again, the vast majority of accuracy isgained with the first sample, and subsequent samples do very
little to improve performance.
Thus, even though few samples will not provide a very accurate estimate of p – definitely not sufficient to have “moral
3 Bernoulli considered moral certainty to be at least 1000:1 odds
1
that the true ratio will be within 50of the measured ratio.

Figure 3: Expected utility per decision, the number of decisions that can be made per unit time, and the expected rate of return (utility perunit time) as a function of the Bernoulli probability and the number of samples (with an example action/sample cost ratio of 232).

certainty” – they are sufficient to choose an action: We do notneed moral certainty to act optimally.

How many samples for a decision?
Lets take seriously the hypothesis that people make inferences based on samples. If this is the case, how many samples should people use before making a decision? For instance, how many possible arrangements of traffic across thecity should we consider before deciding whether to turn left
for the tunnel or right for the bridge? Considering one suchpossibility requires concerted thought and effort – it seems
obvious that we should not pause at the intersection for several hours and enumerate all the possibilities. It also seems
likely that we shouldn’t just turn left or right at random without any consideration. So, how many samples should we take:how hard should we think?
Determining an optimal answer to this meta-cognitive
problem requires that we specify how much a sample may“cost”? To be conservative (and for the sake of simplicity),
we will assume that a sample can only cost time – it takessome amount of time to conjure up an alternate outcome, predict its value, and update a decision variable.
Thus, if a given sample is free (costs 0 time), then weshould take infinitely many samples, and make the best decision possible every time. If a sample costs 1 unit of time,
and the action time (the time that it would take us to act once
we have chosen to do so) is also 1 unit of time, then we shouldtake zero samples we should guess randomly. To make thispeculiar result intuitive, lets be concrete: if we have 100 seconds, and the action time is fixed to be 1 second, then we canmake 100 random decisions, which will be right 50% of thetime, thus giving us an expected reward of $50. If taking asingle sample to improve our decision will cost an additional
second per decision, then if we take one sample per decision,
each decision will take 2 seconds, and we could make at most
50 of them. It is impossible for the expected reward from thisstrategy to be greater than guessing randomly, since even if
100% of the decisions are correct, only $50 will be gained.
Moreover, since 100% accuracy based on one sample is extremely unlikely (this could only arise in a completely deter-

ministic prediction task), substantially less reward should be
expected. Thus, if obtaining a sample takes as long as theaction, and we do not get punished for an incorrect answer,
we should draw zero samples per decision and make as many
random decisions as we can. More generally, we can parameterize how much a sample “costs” as the ratio between thetime required to make an action and the time required to obtain one sample (action/sample ratio) – intuitively, a measureof how many samples it would take to double the time spent
on a decision.
The expected accuracy for a sample-based agent (previous
section) gives us the expected utility per decision as a function of k (the number of samples) and p (the Bernoulli trial
probability; Figure 3a), and the utility function. We consider
two utility functions for the 2AFC case: no punishment – correct: gain 1; incorrect lose 0) and symmetric – correct: gain
1; incorrect: lose 1. Given one particular action/sample time
ratio, we can compute the number of decisions made per unit
time (Figure 3b). Multiplying these two functions together
yields the expected utility per unit time (Figure 3c).
Since p is unknown to the agent, an ideal k must be chosen by taking the expectation over p. This marginalization(assuming a uniform distribution over p) for many different
action/sample time ratios is displayed in Figure 4. It is clearthat as samples become cheaper, one is best advised to takemore of them converging to the limit of infinitely many samples when the samples are free (the action/sample time ratio
is infinity).
In Figure 5 we plot the optimal number of samples as afunction of the action/sample time ratio. Remarkably, forratios less than 10, one is best advised to make decisions
based on only one sample if the utility function is symmetric. Moreover, with no punishment for incorrect answers, theaction/sample time ratio must be 2 or greater before taking
any samples (making a guess thats at all educated, rather thanfully random) becomes a prudent course of action. Thus, under some assumptions about how much it costs to think, making guesses based on very few samples (e.g., one) is the best
course of action: Making many locally suboptimal decisions
quickly is the globally optimal strategy.

Figure 4: Expected utility per decision, number of decisions per unit time, and expected utility per unit time (rate of return) as a function of
the number of samples and action/sample cost ratios. Action/sample cost ratios are logarithmically spaced between 1 (red) and 1000 (yellow).
In the last graph the solid circles indicate the optimal number of samples at that action/sample cost ratio. (The utility function used for thisfigure contained no punishment for an incorrect choice and +1 for a correct choice.)

Figure 5: The optimal number of samples as a function of the action/sample time-cost ratio for each of two utility functions (symmetric – correct: +1, incorrect: -1; and no punishment for incorrect
answers – correct: +1, incorrect: 0).

Discussion
We began with the observation that, on average, people tend
to act consistently with ideal Bayesian inference, integrating
information to optimally build models of the world; however,
locally, they appear to be systematically suboptimal, acting
based on a very limited number of samples. This has beenused to argue that people are not “fully Bayesian” (Mozer etal., 2008). Instead, we have argued that sample-based approximations are a powerful method for implementing approximate Bayesian inference. Although with few samples,
sample-based inferences will deviate from exact Bayesianinference, we showed that for two-alternative forced-choicetasks, a decision based on a very small set of samples is nearly
as good as an optimal decision based on a full probability

distribution. Moreover, we showed that given reasonable assumptions about the time it takes to produce an exact sample,a policy of making decisions based on very few samples (evenjust one) is globally optimal, maximizing long-run utility.
In this paper we considered sample-based decisions about
predictions of variables that had not been previously observed– predictions computed through Bayesian inference over latent variables and structures in the world. However, a large
prior literature on “probability matching” (Herrnstein, 1961;
Vulkan, 2000) has studied a very similar phenomenon in a
simpler task. In probability matching, subjects predict theoutcome of a trial based on the relative frequencies withwhich that outcome has been observed in the past. Thus, subjects have direct evidence of the probability that lever A orlever B should be pulled, but they do not seem to maximize;
instead, they “probability match” and choose levers with afrequency proportional to the probability of reward. On our
account, this literal “probability matching” behavior amounts
to making decisions based on one sample, while decisions
based on more samples would correspond to Luce choice decisions with an exponent greater than 1 (Luce, 1959).
“Probability matching” to previously observed frequencies
is naturally interpreted as sampling prior events from memory. This interpretation is consistent with recent work suggesting that people make decisions based on samples frommemory. Stewart, Chater, and Brown (2006) suggested that apolicy of making decisions through binary preference judgments among alternatives sampled from memory can account for an assortment of human judgment and decisionmaking errors. Similarly, Schneider, Oppenheimer, and Detre(2007) suggest that votes from sampled orientations in multidimensional preference space can account for violations ofcoherent normative utility judgments. A promising direction
for future research would be to relate models suggesting thatsamples are drawn from cognitive processes such as memory,
to models like those we have described in our paper, in whichsamples are drawn from probability distributions reflecting

ideal inferences about the world.
How much might a sample “cost”? A relevant measure ofsample cost in multiple-trial experiments is the ratio between
the time it takes to make an action and go on to the next trial
and the time required to draw a sample to inform a decision
about that action. Ratios near 10 seem quite reasonable: mostexperimental trials last a few seconds, and it can arguably
cost a few hundred milliseconds to consider a hypothesis. Of
course, this is speculation. However, in general, it seems to
us that in most experimental tasks, the benefits gained from abetter decision are relatively small compared to the costs ofspending a very long time thinking. So, if thinking amounts
to sampling possible alternatives before making a decision, it
should not be surprising that people regularly seem to use so
few samples.
We should emphasize that we are not arguing that all human actions and decisions are based on very few samples.
The evidence for sampling-based decisions arises when people make a decision or a choice based on what they thinkis likely to be true (Which example is in the concept? Howlong will this event last? How many airports are there in theUS?). In other situations people appear to integrate over theposterior, or to take many more samples, such as when people make graded inductive judgments (How similar is A toB? How likely is it that X has property P given that Y does?
How likely do you think that F causes G?). It is interesting toconsider why there may be a difference between these sorts
of decisions.
Under reasonable two-alternative choice scenarios, people
are best advised to make decisions based on few samples (future work will extend this to n-AFC and continuous choicedecisions). This captures a very sensible intuition: when weare deciding whether to turn left or right at an intersection, we
should not enumerate every possible map of the world. We do
not need “moral certainty” about the probability that left or
right will lead to the fastest route to our destination – we justneed to make a decision. We must implicitly weigh the benefits of improving our decision by thinking for a longer periodof time against the cost of spending more time and effort deliberating. Intuition suggests that we do this in the real world:
we think harder before deciding whether to go north or south
on an interstate (where a wrong decision can lead to a detourof many miles), than when we are looking for a house (where
the wrong decision will have minimal cost). Empirical evidence confirms this: when the stakes are high, people startmaximizing instead of “probability matching” (Shanks, Tunney, & McCarthy, 2002). Nonetheless, it seems that in simple circumstances, deliberating is rarely the prudent course ofaction – for the most part, making quick, locally suboptimal,
decisions is the globally optimal policy: one and done.
Acknowledgments. This work was supported by ONR MURI (JBT,
PI: Bavelier); Russell Sage, NDSEG, NSF Dissertation grant (EV).

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