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!!