<p>Balancing a combination of 'sticking with what you know' and 'exploring new things' is optimal in a lot of environments. What the optimal balance is depends on a bunch of factors like your planning horizon, the distribution of good things in the world (common/rare &amp; similar/dissimilar), and how you interact with them (reusable, like a shortcut, depleting, like a gold mine, or one-shot interaction like buying a house).</p>

<p>People are really surprisingly good at this! Fun search terms for google scholar might be "explore/exploit tradeoff" or "multi-arm bandit problems" [with humans]. But it's a big and complicated literature, actually I'd recommend starting with a popsci version, "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I think you might enjoy it, it's a great book, very readable, and it goes into some detail on this question and a few of its near neighbors.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-29T15:38:43.897Z
Ok, I guess it's kinda cheating to suggest scholar search terms instead of specific articles! But the OP is so broad, I don't know whether to respond with restless bandits or reinforcement learning or what. Every combination of the different factors in that first paragraph is a different paradigm, really.  For general background reading I can't think of a better option than that Christian & Griffiths book, it does a pretty good job of being interesting to the full audience range from researcher to casual interest.
steveLangsford
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-29T20:56:32.803Z
I actually upvoted this question after seeing there was a reference in the body text. I'll remove my comment.
AliceD
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-26T14:02:51.563Z
2018-10-26T14:02:51.563Z
steveLangsford
<p>People generally resist change, yet they have a desire for diversification.<br>Of course, both is possible. Just like the need of safety but the desire for new discoveries and adventures.</p>

<p>But what is the psychological explaination? Is there anything I misunderstood?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-25T18:50:11.000Z
I'm not really clear what the question is here, even if we take what you've proposed as a given (resistance to change/desire for diversification; a bit unclear without defining your terms) you've already said both are possible, yet they seem to be in opposition, but contradiction is completely normal in behavior, it needs no special explanation from psychology.
Bryan Krause
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-25T19:15:25.247Z
Could you cite where you learned about each of these two seemingly contradictory statements?
Steven Jeuris
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-28T09:22:23.827Z
Welcome to Psychology.SE. We work differently to most SE sites, where we have a strict policy that all questions should [show evidence of prior research](https://psychology.meta.stackexchange.com/q/993). Please help us to help you and [edit] your question to provide more information on what you have read on this subject, what made you ask this question, and any problems you are having understanding your research. If you found nothing, what did you Google? This helps to provide an answer which will be more helpful. If you still have trouble with this, please visit the [ask] page or [meta].
Chris Rogers
<attitudes><needs>
People do not like change, but need diversification? Is that not contradictive?
neverMind9
# People do not like change, but need diversification? Is that not contradictive?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-10-25)

People generally resist change, yet they have a desire for diversification.  
Of course, both is possible. Just like the need of safety but the desire for new discoveries and adventures.

But what is the psychological explaination? Is there anything I misunderstood?

**Tags:** attitudes, needs

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I'm not really clear what the question is here, even if we take what you've proposed as a given (resistance to change/desire for diversification; a bit unclear without defining your terms) you've already said both are possible, yet they seem to be in opposition, but contradiction is completely normal in behavior, it needs no special explanation from psychology.  
> **username_2**: Could you cite where you learned about each of these two seemingly contradictory statements?  
> **username_3**: Welcome to Psychology.SE. We work differently to most SE sites, where we have a strict policy that all questions should [show evidence of prior research](https://psychology.meta.stackexchange.com/q/993). Please help us to help you and [edit] your question to provide more information on what you have read on this subject, what made you ask this question, and any problems you are having understanding your research. If you found nothing, what did you Google? This helps to provide an answer which will be more helpful. If you still have trouble with this, please visit the [ask] page or [meta].  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_4 on 2018-10-26. Score: 2 | Accepted answer

Balancing a combination of 'sticking with what you know' and 'exploring new things' is optimal in a lot of environments. What the optimal balance is depends on a bunch of factors like your planning horizon, the distribution of good things in the world (common/rare & similar/dissimilar), and how you interact with them (reusable, like a shortcut, depleting, like a gold mine, or one-shot interaction like buying a house).

People are really surprisingly good at this! Fun search terms for google scholar might be "explore/exploit tradeoff" or "multi-arm bandit problems" [with humans]. But it's a big and complicated literature, actually I'd recommend starting with a popsci version, "Algorithms to live by" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I think you might enjoy it, it's a great book, very readable, and it goes into some detail on this question and a few of its near neighbors.

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: Ok, I guess it's kinda cheating to suggest scholar search terms instead of specific articles! But the OP is so broad, I don't know whether to respond with restless bandits or reinforcement learning or what. Every combination of the different factors in that first paragraph is a different paradigm, really.  For general background reading I can't think of a better option than that Christian & Griffiths book, it does a pretty good job of being interesting to the full audience range from researcher to casual interest.  
> **username_5**: I actually upvoted this question after seeing there was a reference in the body text. I'll remove my comment.  

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