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.