Early 2020 is a truly Interesting time for decision making. We have learned what an inexact science risk communication is and had Robin Hogarth’s statement reemphasized:
“Human achievement is lower when there are nonlinearities in the ecology.” (What has Brunswik’s Lens Model Taught?).
Taming Uncertainty by Ralph Hertwig (See posts Dialectical Bootstrapping and Harnessing the Inner Crowd.), Timothy J Pleskac (See post Risk Reward Heuristic.), Thorsten Pachur (See post Emotion and Risky Choice.) and the Center for Adaptive Rationality, MIT Press, 2019, is a new compendium that I found accidentally in a public library. There is plenty of interesting reading in the book. It takes the adaptive toolbox approach as opposed to the Swiss Army Knife . The book gets back cover raves from Cass Sunstein (See posts Going to Extremes, Confidence, Part 1.), Nick Chater, and Gerd Gigerenzer (See post Gigerenzer–Risk Saavy, and others.). I like the pieces, but not the whole.
This post is inspired by The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu, Vintage Books, 2017, New York. Decision making is not a front line issue in the book, but it is also clear that we cannot control our decision making if we cannot control our attention. The book begins as a history of what has grabbed our attention from newspapers and posters to radio to television to computers and video games, to the internet and its vehicles including our present attention grabber, the cell phone. Of course, each attention platform has ultimately had to make money and advertising has been the dominant path chosen. Advertising is the villain only to the extent that it puts able resources into effectively capturing our attention. But we do not check our email so often or play video games so long due to advertising. There is definitely some behavioral conditioning going on. Wu mentions that video games can even: “induce a ‘flow state’, that form of contentment, of optimal experience, described by the cognitive scientist Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, in which people feel ‘strong, alert, if effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.”
Now the confidence heuristic is not the only thing Trump takes advantage of, but we will leave those for another time. I will also avoid the question of whether or not Trump is actually confident. So what is the relationship of confidence and decision making? Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow on page 13 describes:
a puzzling limitation of our mind: our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight.
Confidence is defined as our degree of belief that a certain thought or action is correct. There is confidence in your own individual decisions or perceptions and then the between person confidence where you defer your own decision making to someone else.
Why am I thinking of confidence? An article by Cass Sunstein explains it well. The article appeared in Bloomberg, Politics & Policy, October 18, 2018, Bloomberg Opinion, “Donald Trump is Amazing. Here’s the Science to Prove It.”
This post is largely a continuation of the Kenneth R Hammond post, but one prompted by recent current events. My opinion on gun control is probably readily apparent. But if it is not, let me say that I go crazy when mental health is bandied about as the reason for our school shootings or when we hear that arming teachers is a solution to anything. However, going crazy or questioning the sincerity of people with whom you are arguing is not a good idea. Dan Kahan (See my posts Cultural Cognition or Curiosity or his blog Cultural Cognition) has some great ideas on this, but Ken Hammond actually had accomplishments and they could help guide all of us today. I should note also that I was unable to quickly find the original sources so I am relying completely on: “Kenneth R. Hammond’s contributions to the study of judgment and decision making,” written by Mandeep K. Dhami and Jeryl L. Mumpower that appeared in Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2018, pp. 1–22.
Why do almost all people tell the truth in ordinary everyday
life? […] The reason is, firstly because it is easier; for
lying demands invention, dissimulation, and a good memory
(Friedrich Nietzsche, page 54, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 1878)
This post is based on the paper: ” ‘ I can see it in your eyes’: Biased Processing and Increased Arousal in Dishonest Responses,” authored by Guy Hochman, Andreas Glockner, Susan Fiedler, and Shahar Ayal, that appeared in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, December 2015.
This post is based on a comment paper: “Honest People Tend to Use Less–Not More—Profanity: Comment on Feldman et al.’s (2017) Study,” that appeared in Social Psychological and Personality Science 1-5 and was written by R. E. de Vries, B. E. Hilbig, Ingo Zettler, P. D. Dunlop, D. Holtrop, K. Lee, and M. C. Ashton. Why would honesty suddenly be important with respect to decision making when I have largely ignored it in the past? You will have to figure that out for yourself. It reminded me that most of our decision making machinery is based on relative differences. We compare, but we are not so good at absolutes. Thus, when you get a relentless fearless liar, the relative differences are widened and this is likely to spread out what seems to be a reasonable decision.
This post is based on a paper: “The Two Settings of Kind and Wicked Learning Environments” written by Robin M. Hogarth, Tomás Lejarraga, and Emre Soyer that appeared in Current Directions in Psychological Science 2015, Vol. 24(5) 379–385. Hogarth created the idea of kind and wicked learning environments and it is discussed in his book Educating Intuition.
Hogarth et al state that inference involves two settings: In the first, information is acquired (learning); in the second, it is applied (predictions or choices). Kind learning environments involve close matches between the informational elements in the two settings and are a necessary condition for accurate inferences. Wicked learning environments involve mismatches.
This post is based on a paper: “Learning from experience in nonlinear environments: Evidence from a competition scenario,” authored by Emre Soyer and Robin M. Hogarth, Cognitive Psychology 81 (2015) 48-73. It is not a new topic, but adds to the evidence of our nonlinear shortcomings.
In 1980, Brehmer questioned whether people can learn from experience – more specifically, whether they can learn to make appropriate inferential judgments in probabilistic environments outside the psychological laboratory. His assessment was quite pessimistic. Other scholars have also highlighted difficulties in learning from experience. Klayman, for example, pointed out that in naturally occurring environments, feedback can be scarce, subject to distortion, and biased by lack of appropriate comparative data. Hogarth asked when experience-based judgments are accurate and introduced the concepts of kind and wicked learning environments (see post Learning, Feedback, and Intuition). In kind learning environments, people receive plentiful, accurate feedback on their judgments; but in wicked learning environments they don’t. Thus, Hogarth argued, a kind learning environment is a necessary condition for learning from experience whereas wicked learning environments lead to error. This paper explores the boundary conditions of learning to make inferential judgments from experience in kind environments. Such learning depends on both identifying relevant information and aggregating information appropriately. Moreover, for many tasks in the naturally occurring environment, people have prior beliefs about cues and how they should be aggregated.