Thoughts on week 11

Our last class session was on Friday 18th December. A further six group presentations were given this week, including my group.

Preparing our presentation was a good learning experience; I now know how to use the presentation package in Google documents, we made time to practice our presentation beforehand, which helped with timing etc and I feel as if I know the Kruger & Dunning experiments like the back of my hand!

Listening & watching the other presentations also provided food for thought; don't get caught up in trying to repeat every little detail from a paper, I did this to a certain extent when preparing my slides, but luckily learnt from the presentations before ours how boring it can be to be told how many students took part; this point also carries over into the actual slides - lots of text is not visually interesting, unless it contains spelling mistakes and then it's just annoying (!). Another point is keep to the time allocated - it's not easy to maintain interest after the second long presentation (so I haven't got anything to write about subject matter this week!).

However, all of this is useful from the point of view of improving my own presentations.

So, just the wiki page on "overconfidence" to work on now. I'm looking specifically at a paper that addresses the criticisms of the Kruger & Dunning study, which we used for our presentation, so am interested to see how further research develops the topic...

Thoughts on week 10

This week in class we had four presentations from other groups, the subjects of which were thought provoking...

• Inequality Aversion: this covered the area of unequal pay and Capuchin monkeys. The most interesting point for me was the possible explanation that a sense of justice may be inherited, not just a social construct. Certainly worth looking into further.
• Social Dilemmas: using fluctuating asymmetry as a measure of male attractiveness, it was shown that such attractiveness was associated with uncooperative tendencies. Although there appeared to be lots of methodological issues with regard to the study, the issue of unattractive individuals having to put more effort in to get things was interesting and rang some bells from the past re other stuff I've come across with regard to people's performances in job interviews and why women should always wear makeup for interviews...
• The one or the many: this presentation dealt with contributions to single/group, identified/unidentified victims. I have come across this subject before, when I completed a study last year for a 3rd year student's project.
• Foraging decisions in hummingbirds: I didn't manage to pick anything up from this presentation, apart from the wonderful presentations that can be produced on Mac computers! However, an interesting point was made in the discussion that followed: it has long been assumed that animals use rational decision making models and much research has been based on this assumption; however, it seems that this may not be the case and that models more akin to heuristics are being used, similar to humans.

Preparation for our presentation on Overconfidence next week continues. Have now learnt how to use Google presentations and finally (!) worked out how to add a picture to it, which is no mean feat when copy & paste doesn't work so well on Google docs, as documented when you search for help! I've also finished reading the other papers on this subject, around which we'll be basing our wiki page and it was interesting to see that Kruger & Dunning's initial findings seem to be very robust, as tested by Ehrlinger et al (2008). The latter also raise some very interesting issues with regard to the application of their findings, but more of this on the wiki page...

Thoughts on week 9

There was no formal class this week, but our group met to start planning for the presentation and next wiki page that we will working on with regard to the subject of overconfidence.

So far, I have reviewed one of the papers (Kruger & Dunning) which details findings of "incompetent" individuals being much more overconfident about their performance, than "competent" individuals, in various domains.

This initial reading brought to mind the following points, which I will investigate further in the course of writing the next wiki page:

• The misunderstanding of the role of luck in performance. Taleb discusses this issue in both of his books, "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan", with specific regard to individuals feeling that they had performed really well, when in fact their success can be attributed to luck.
• Knowing how little you know being of more relevance than how much you know, in both the areas of self-development and understanding the possible causes of the results achieved, which can aid future learning & performance.
• From my previous work experience: people's view of experts and not understanding what is required to achieve such a level. This sometimes being as simple as knowing the sources of information and perhaps, knowing more importantly that in fact there are no sources of information for a particular subject. This latter point also relates to the previous one about knowing how little you know.

So now it's on to reviewing the other papers and getting our group to agree on who does what for our presentation...

Thoughts on week 8

The purpose of the class this week was to review the subjects we have looked at so far, so it was more of a general discussion.

Particular points of interest for me were:

• Role of emotion: this was highlighted as an area that is now being investigated with regard to fast & frugal heuristics. It raises the issue that the use of heuristics may not just be cognitive. A point to be aware of and look into.
• Use of fast & frugal heuristics by judges: again, concern was raised about the use of such heuristics in the domain of decision making by judges. However, one point that wasn't raised is the possibility that judges only use such heuristics when they have reached a certain level of "expertise" in their field and that it may be this level of expertise that allows them to be time effective by using the heuristics. It would be interesting to find out if any research has been done comparing "experienced" and "inexperienced" judges, to see if there is any evidence of difference in the possible use of heuristics.
• Prospect Theory: this is being used to look at how health messages are framed
• Reference points in Prospect Theory can be goals: we came across this concept in previous lectures, but this time the issue was highlighted with regard to marathon runners. Recent research has shown that if they fail to meet a goal they are much unhappier than those who have overachieved on a goal are happier, presumably without regard to any of the actual times that are achieved. This highlights the importance of setting realistic goals (part of the SMART formula used for goal setting) and the emotional effect of not achieving unrealistic goals. Of course, you need to be aware of what are realistic goals, which ties in with the next subject for our groups wiki page, which is overconfidence. One area of this is a link between incompetence and being unaware of your level of incompetence. So if you're failing to meet your goals this might be because you don't know that they are the "wrong goals", so you're feeling bad for not achieving something that you couldn't achieve in the first place. Quite a paradox and must link in some way to self awareness!!

Thoughts on week 7

We didn't have a class this week as David was away at the annual conference of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. This took me back to my readings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books "The Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness" over the summer, in one of which he mentions attending just such conference. I'm wondering if David came across him this time? By the way, I can thoroughly recommend both books.

Our group used the time last week to have a meeting to discuss our group wiki page and what needed to be done to complete it before the extended deadline. I don't know about everyone else, but I've found creating the wiki page an interesting challenge. It's very different from writing essays or other types of group work that I've done so far, but overall I think I like it as a form of assessment. I think it also makes group work a bit easier because so much can be done in your own time and the ability to leave comments is a good replacement for face to face meetings, which can sometimes be difficult just from the point of view of getting people together.

So, it's on to the next wiki page...

Thoughts on week 6

This week we looked at the subject of "preference and choice", specifically, how we judge the monetary value of objects in order to make decisions about the object based on this judgment.

The paper reviewed by our group was "Aspects of endowment: a query theory of value construction", Johnson, Haubel & Keinan (2007). The authors present a memory-based account of endowment, which suggests that the value of an object is decided by the order and type of questions (aspects) about an object that we think about when arriving at a valuation.

In summary, their findings showed:

• Buyers produce more value-decreasing aspects (positive thoughts about the money and negative thoughts about the mug)
• Sellers produce more value-increasing aspects (mug: positive, money: negative)
• Buyers and sellers think about aspects in different orders
• The endowment effect can be eliminated by asking buyers and sellers to think about aspects in an order that is opposite to that which they seem to normally use
• The endowment effect can be produced, even without anyone possessing a mug, just by asking buyers and sellers to think about aspects in specific orders

The other papers presented this week dealt with various endowment effect experiments (Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler (1990)) and a comparison of the Neoclassical Theory, which seems to be used by experts and Prospect Theory, which seems to be used by people who are inexperienced in a particular area (List (2004)).

Interesting thoughts from all of this:

• An example was given of how different people could consider the value of a bottle of wine, with a wine drinker having very different considerations from an investor in wine. This highlights how two people both possessing the same bottle of wine might reach very different valuations. Previously the comparison has been between different valuations arrived at by buyers and sellers.
• The housing market also provides some interesting examples. Consider when there are a lot of "buy to let" investors in the housing market. They might value a property very differently from someone who wants to buy it to live in it. (Can compare back to the wine drinker and the wine investor). This will effect the housing market. A second example can be seen from a falling house price market, as seen recently. Sellers seemed to be unwilling to accept a drop in price, viewing this as a loss even though they may still be in a total gain situation based on the price that they paid for the property. However, the market seemed to start moving again once people realised that a loss on the property that they are selling becomes a gain on the next property that they buy, which would be at a reduced price.

All very interesting and shows the value of knowing as much as you can about someone else's position, if you're ever in a negotiating situation. Of course, in the real world...

More thoughts on week 4

David, following your further comments on my second graphs, I have now produced two corrected ones (based on the answers I would have given if I had read the questions properly), as shown above.

The previous Certainty Equivalence graph had that odd kink in it because I did not enter the monetary values in order. The previous Probability Equivalence graph only had 4 points because there were two values for 500 at .65 (due to reading the question incorrectly).

Further thoughts on weeks 2 & 3

Returning to the topic of "fast and frugal" decision making, I want to pick up on David's comment.

If I were describing Franklin's Rule and the Matching Heuristic to someone who didn't know anything about the subject matter, I might try something like the following...

...if you think of a "cue" as an individual piece of information that is relevant to a particular decision, then, if you were using Franklin's rule to come to a decision, you would consider every single cue and it's importance (what we call "weighting") and combine all of this information to make the decision. However, if you were using the Matching Heuristic, you would only search through some of the cues and base your decision on the first one that you came to that seemed to have a particularly relevant value...

Comments sought on how useful this description is...

Further thoughts on week 4

Here's two further graphs, which as well as showing utility measurement, also reflect very well a measure of stupidity (mine!).

Following David's comments on my "Thoughts on week 4", I revisited the graph producing exercise and produced these initially rather interesting graphs for comparison. However, on considering why they are so different and the graph for certainty equivalence so odd, it would appear that the certain answer is that I didn't read question 3 under the certainty equivalence measure properly (I answered it as if it read exactly the same as question1).

The utility value of this blog as a learning tool has just increased substantially...

Thoughts on week 5

This week we moved on to the subject of "decision framing".

Our group studied the Kahneman & Tversky (1984) paper, "Choices, Values and Frames". This is a really good paper to start with on the subject. The abstract provides a succinct summary of their findings:

• Risk aversion for gains
• Risk seeking for losses
• Overweighting of sure things and those with very small probabilities
• Invariance: different descriptions of the same outcomes lead to different choices. This shouldn't be the case under the invariance criterion
• Negative outcomes might be more acceptable if described as a cost rather than a loss
• The value of an experience is important

The relevance of these findings can be applied in numerous situations. For example:

• Politics: describing outcomes in the most advantageous way for your particular cause

The presentations from the other groups highlighted the further work that has been done with regard to framing effects and some of the contradictory results.

All worth knowing if you ever need to persuade people to take a particular course of action. Unless, of course, they're psychology students and fully aware of such tactics!

Thoughts on week 4

This week we have been reviewing the subject of "Decision making under risk and uncertainty", looking at utility measures, expected utility theory and psychological theories.

Again, there were a few definitions that I picked up, which I find useful to remember:

• Utility - subjective value (as opposed to objective value), a measure of pleasure/displeasure or of usefulness


• Risk - probabilities that are known


• Uncertainty - probabilities that aren't known


• Prospect Theory - outcomes are coded as gains or losses from a reference point. The reference point is subjective & moveable and might be an expectation or an aspiration. A gain might actually be a psychological loss

We also looked at the Priority Heuristic, which I think can be thought of as another "fast & frugal" way of decision making.

An exercise was provided to measure our own utility function. The graph of my results is above (couldn't find out how to move it!). The measure looks at certainty equivalence and probability equivalence, with both methods producing the same results. Not quite the case for my graph! Considering why my 2 measures are not the same, I recalled that when I answered the first set of questions (certainty equivalence) I felt as if I was putting in the "right" answers, i.e. what was logical. When I answered the second set of questions (probability equivalence), I had to think much more about this and was less certain of my answers. I also felt that I needed to amend my answers to the first set of questions, to answer them more "truthfully" than rationally. A very interesting exercise, which I'll go back and do again sometime to see if I answer differently having been through this current thought process. In the meantime, no more snappy decisions!!

Thoughts on weeks 2 & 3

For these 2 weeks, the topic for study was "Reasoning the fast and frugal way".

My group studied the paper by Dhami (2003), which looks at professional decision making, specifically in the realm of decisions made by judges with regard to granting bail to an individual. In summary, the paper found that the Matching Hueristic was a better predictor of the judges decisons than the Franklin Model (very similar to a regression model) and that the specific cues used under the Matching Hueristic relate to decisions taken by other people.

I presented a summary of our group discussion about the paper to the rest of the class. I found this really useful because knowing that you have to stand up in front of people and talk about something that you have read and discussed is a great concentrator of the mind!

From our group discussion and comments from the rest of the class on this subject, it seems that there is a resistance to wanting to consider that people making such decisions as the judges, might be doing so on the basis of very few cues rather than all of the information to hand. This ties in with a further interesting thought about how people would react if you told them that this is what they appear to be doing...

This subject brought back thoughts for me on how bankers used to decide whether to lend money to companies or individuals on the basis of their own individual analysis of the situation, and how this developed over time into the use of credit scoring and decisions made by computer packages.

Thoughts on week 1

Week 1 was basically an introduction to the Judgment and Decision Making module.

This module will be assessed on work throughout the module, rather than by final exam. I'm keen to work on this basis to try out other forms of assessment. Although I have had previous modules that have involved an element of coursework, I'm looking forward to the challenge of ongoing, different formats.

One particular aspect that I found useful from the reading for this week was the distinction between a judgment and a decision. In previous cognitive psychology modules, under which we have touched upon judgment and decision making, I have always found this quite difficult to explain. It's now firmly fixed in my mind - a judgment involves evaluation or estimation of something and a decison involves an intention to act in some way.