730 publications from this institution
Diagnostic tests are looked to as an essential tool in the fight to contain the coronavirus and guide the reopening of economies. Much is said about problems with gaining access to these tests. Very little is said about their accuracy. These tests are assumed to be highly accurate. However, unless a test is perfect, accuracy can be greatly affected by the prevalence of infection in the population being tested, also known as the base-rate. Other contextual factors such as symptomatology and prior exposure also need to be taken into account along with base rates. One rarely hears anything about the importance of base rates because, unless one is schooled in their importance, they are not understood, not deemed relevant, and are thus neglected. Relying on diagnostic tests without verifying their accuracy and helping people interpret them will compound the crisis already underway and delay recovery.
Utility theory, in one form or another, has provided the guiding principle for prescribing and describing gambling decisions since the 18th century. The expected utility principle asserts that given a choice among gambles, the decision maker will select the one with the highest expected utility.
Two studies investigated how free associations to decision alternatives could be used to describe decision processes. Choices between San Francisco and San Diego as a vacation city were investigated in the first study with US participants. The participants were asked to list any association that occurred to them while thinking about each of the cities in turn. After this, the attractiveness values of these associations were elicited from each individual. Half of the subjects gave the associations before the decision and half after having made their decisions. In congruence with Differentiation and Consolidation theory (Svenson, 1996), the attractiveness values of the associations were more supportive of the chosen alternative after the decision than before primarily on more important attributes. The results also showed that a significant number of associations were neutral and had no affective positive or negative value. The participants in the second very similar study were also asked to rate their immediate holistic/overall emotional reactions to each of the vacation cities (in this case Paris and Rome with Swedish subjects) before the start of the experiment and the associations. After having given their associations, rated them and made their decisions, the participants were asked to go back to their earlier attractiveness ratings and judge the strengths of the emotional/affect and cognitive/rational value components of each of the earlier associations. The results replicated the results from the first study in that the average rated attractiveness of the associations to a chosen alternative was stronger after a decision than before. However, the change was smaller than in Study 1, which was interpreted as a possible result of the initial holistic associations given in Study 2. It was concluded that the technique of free associations is a valuable tool in process studies of decision making, here based on the Diff Con theoretical framework.
Imagine a primer on risk and its management written for both risk specialists and the general public. It is impossible to address both audiences with the same material, you might think. Well, Kimberly Thompson has done it with Risk in Perspective: Insight and Humor in the Age of Risk Management.
The More Who Die, the Less We Care Psychic Numbing and Genocide was published in Imagining Human Rights on page 55.
Affective processes were predicted to play a critical role in choices among complex stimuli. As hypothesized, self-report measures of individual differences in affective information processing were associated with choices in a task designed by Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) to mimic the gains, losses, and uncertainties of real life decisions. The results were stronger when the processing of losses was considered separately from the processing of gains. Greater negative affectivity was associated with more avoidance of high-loss options; greater positive affectivity was associated with more choices from high-gain options. Both measures of affectivity added unique explanatory power to the prediction of choices among the decks over and above conscious knowledge about the decks. Affect appears to play an important role in guiding decisions and judgments.
Stalin knew that people respond less strongly to mass murder than to individual tragedy. That's why emotion alone won't prevent genocide, says Paul Slovic
The idea that careful analysis leads to better decisions is pervasive in research on decision making. Intriguingly, results raise the possibility that thinking about reasons for decisions before deciding may degrade decision quality. This paper reports the results of a laboratory study which examined whether task characteristics critically influence the effects of thinking about reasons on decision quality. We found that explicit reasoning degraded judgement quality, objectively measured, on an 'intuitive' task. However, we also found that explicit reasoning enhanced performance on an 'analytic' task. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Abstract : To merit publication a study must be informative; the reader must not feel that the results could have been confidently predicted prior to conducting the study. Earlier studies of the psychology of hindsight have shown that people overestimate the predictability of past events. This report examines whether they also overestimate the predictability of experimental results. Three experiments strongly suggest that reviewers may overestimate the degree to which they could have predicted the reported results of experiments. The implications of this bias for the journal review process, and some ways in which it might be alleviated, are discussed.
This article reports progress in an ongoing research program examining older adults' decision-making competence (DMC). Using a theoretical framework that emphasizes the person-task fit in assessing DMC, the authors report the results of a study comparing older versus younger adults' decision performance on simple and complex tasks about health, finance, and nutrition. The authors hypothesized and found that increasing age and task complexity were related to greater comprehension errors and inconsistency in decision making. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that a large amount of age-related variance in performance on the decision tasks could be accounted for by exogenous social variables, health measures, basic cognitive skills, and attitudinal measures. The discussion emphasizes several directions for future research, including the need to validate the meaning of performance on these tasks for real-life decision processes.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Public support for nuclear power has declined greatly, driven by a number of powerful forces and events. Numerous studies have demonstrated the public`s extreme perceptions of risk and negative attitudes regarding nuclear power. This negativity is remarkable in light of the confidence most technical analysts have regarding the safety of this technology. Public fears and opposition to nuclear power can be seen as a crisis in confidence, a profound breakdown in trust in the scientific, governmental, and industrial managers of nuclear technologies. The problem is not due to public ignorance or irrationality, but is deeply rooted in individual psychology and the adversarial nature of our social, institutional, legal, and political systems of risk management. In the absence of revolutionary changes in the ways that risks are managed in our society, it is unlikely that public trust, confidence, and acceptance of nuclear power can be regained.
How often are people wrong when they are certain that they know the answer to a question? The studies reported here suggest that the answer is "too often." For a variety of general-knowledge questions (e.g., absinthe is [a] a liqueur or [b] a precious stone), subjects first chose the most likely answer and then indicated their degree of certainty that the answer they had selected was, in fact, correct. Across several different question and response formats, subjects were consistently overconfident. They had sufficient faith in their confidence judgments to be willing to stake money on their validity. The psychological bases for unwarranted certainty are discussed in terms of the inferential processes whereby knowledge is constructed from perceptions and memories.
In diesem Kapitel werde ich in wenigen Worten die Psychologie des Risikos und einige ihrer Implikationen beschreiben. Dabei werde ich mit einer Untersuchung der Subjektivität beginnen, sowie den Werten, welche in der Definition und Beurteilung von Risiko...
