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Week 1: Overview and Historical Precursors

The reading for this week includes three historical reviews, two from the “old” and “middle” ages of the study of judgment and decision making, and the introduction to the forthcoming Handbook of JDM. The objective of this meeting is to give students a sense of the origins of the hybrid field of Judgment & Decision Making, the objectives of researchers in the field, and an overview of some of the research themes and questions that are central in current research.

Edwards, W. (1954). The theory of decision making. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 380-417.

Slovic, Paul, Baruch Fischhoff, and Sarah Lichtenstein (1977). Behavioral Decision Making, Annual Review of Psychology 28, 1-39.

Keren, G., & Wu, G. (2015). A bird’s-eye view of the history of judgment and decision making. (In G. Keren and G. Wu (Eds.), Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making

+ Table of Contents for Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making.

(OPTIONAL) Goldstein, William M. and Robin M. Hogarth (1997). “Judgment and decision making: Some historical context", in William M. Goldstein and Robin M. Hogarth (Eds.), Research on Judgment and Decision Making: Currents, Connections, and Controversies (Cambridge University Press), pp. 3-65.

Thought Questions (be prepared to contribute orally to a discussion organized around these questions)

1. This collection of papers represents several overviews of research on judgment and decision making, written over a span of about 60 years, from the “old ages" of the field (Edwards) to a recent historical review (Keren and Wu). These articles, as well as other reviews in the Annual Review of Psychology and reviews cited on page 3 of Keren and Wu, were not written by the same academics and have different emphases. Nevertheless, they summarize themes and changes in the field over the years.

How has the field changed in the 20 years from Edwards review to Slovic et al’s review, and more recently in the 35+ years since Slovic et al’s review? Consider both what we know, as well as what we care about. For each period (Early - origins-1954; Middle - 1954-1977; Recent - 1977-today): What were the major questions that guided research? What kinds of theories were popular? What were the landmark empirical/factual discoveries?

2. Given your (admittedly very new) understanding of the field of Judgment & Decision Making, what current questions under active investigation in the field are of special interest to you personally? If you were to enter the field today, what phenomena would you like to study?

3. In reading the Keren and Wu chapter, are there important historical themes and questions that have dropped off of the field’s list of “current topics”? Any thoughts on why they were abandoned? Should any of these problems be resurrected?

4. Goldstein & Hogarth’s history of the field (not assigned) identifies 2 streams of research, one focused on developing descriptive models of judgment (e.g., an algebraic equation [the model] that describes the manner in which a human weights information when judging the intelligence of another person) and one focused on comparing rational, optimal models to actual behavior (e.g., a model for optimal choice among gambles compared to human behavior when choosing among gambles). In the first case, rationality or optimality is in the background and the goal is to create models from studies of behavior. In the second case, research usually begins with the definition of a task (not behavior in the task) and the construction of a rational solution to the task (see Edwards, 1954, for a clear example of this approach). Only after the rational analysis is complete is behavior considered, and then initially under the hypothesis that behavior in the task will match the rational solution. There is a further assumption that the rational model will be the basis for a descriptive model. (Later, many researchers became more interested in the discrepancies between the rational solution and behavior; though in many cases they still relied on the rational model as the inspiration for their descriptive models – you can see this in the Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein review from 1977.)

One theme that will appear again and again in this course concerns the interplay between rational, optimal models (customarily called “normative models”) and descriptive models. Why would a psychological analysis care about rational, optimal, normative models? If the goal of psychological science is to describe and predict actual human behavior, why bring in optimality or rationality at all?

5. What do you personally think a psychological behavioral theory should do, should provide (alternately ‘a micro-economic behavioral theory’)? Try to answer this question, realistically, given your assessment of the current state of factual and theoretical knowledge about human behavior.* Suppose you had a behavioral theory of some domain of decision making (consumer choice, mate selection, financial investing, …), what should your theory be able to do? Will it make predictions of behavior in a novel decision task? What would a prediction look like, that the fully-developed version of the theory you are thinking of would make? How, realistically, could such predictions be derived from theoretical assumptions? If it does not make predictions, what does it do instead? *Psychology [Economics] is not Chemistry or Physics.