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Hot answers tagged decision-making

8

Perhaps the best well-known example of asking patients to do something at random was performed by Benjamin Libet in 1983[1]. Libet asked patients to wait until a spontaneous moment and push a button as they watched an animated clockhand circle. Surprisingly, what he found was that there were about 200 ms between cerebral activity indicating the patient was ...

8

There is currently a lot of debate surrounding what questions Bayesian modeling is appropriate for answering within cognitive science, as well what makes a "poor model." Unfortunately these become extremely thorny issues very quickly, partly because what is called "bayesian modeling" actually refers to a rather heterogeneous set of approaches and ...

7

I recently read a paper, which showed a mathematical model for performance scaling of research groups in different scientific branches. I'm aware you were originally asking for smaller "cognitive tasks" and project-like group-processes in the comments, but output and quality of publications/patents is probably anyway a better and more objective measure on a ...

7

The classic reference for exactly what you are describing is Gilovich & Medvec, 1995 (LINK), the primary thesis of which is that "Actions, or errors of commission, generate more regret in the short term; but inactions, or errors of omission, produce more regret in the long run" (from the abstract). The authors explain that there are many factors that ...

7

Dehaene & Changeux (1991) made a neural-network model: The coding units are clusters of neurons organized in layers, or assemblies. A sensonmotor loop enables the network to sort the input cards according to several criteria (color, form, etc.). A higher-level assembly of rule-coding clusters codes for the currently tested rule, which shifts when ...

6

A nice summary about heuristics can be found in: Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic Decision Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 451–482. In this review "satisficing" (accepting a good enough option) is referred to an earlier reference than the 1958 you cite: Simon, H.A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Q. J. Econ. ...

6

I've found Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being by E.F.P. Luttmer (2005), although I'm not sure it's the right one. I've heard about your study as well, but I thought it was older than 2005. You can read the study I linked and look up the references. There are quite a lot that touch the same subject.

6

In naïve realism, the subject acknowledges others' points of view while affirming the superiority of his/her own. Ross and Ward (1996) review the literature. I tried to write a summary of their fine paper, but I couldn't do it justice. I provide a link to it below. In selfishness or unenlightened self-interest, the subject may consider multiple points of ...

5

The probability of conjunctive events (all six tosses are heads) are overestimated, relative to a single event of similar overall probability. This result has been shown by Paul Slovic, in an experiment that is described in its abstract as follows: This study examined the effects on the attractiveness of a gamble, of manipulating the number and ...

5

I believe these questions are dealt with by "support theory," the seminal publications being: Tversky, A., & Koehler, D. J. (1994). Support theory: A nonextensional representation of subjective probability. Psychological Review, 101(4), 547-566. Rottenstreich, Y., & Tversky, A. (1997). Unpacking, repacking, and anchoring: advances in support ...

5

The experiment you are referring to is usually called the ultimatum game, and was first experimentally tested by Güth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze in 1982 [1]. [1] Güth, Werner, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze. "An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 3.4 (1982): 367-388. PDF

5

Decision-making or decision theory is its own subdiscipline under cognitive science (also often studied by statisticians, philosophers, economists, and faculty in business schools). Within this discipline, understanding how stress affects your behavior is very important and not understudied area. For a recent survey with a neurobiological focus, see: ...

5

Obedience The most famous paper dealing with this issue is Milgram's paper, called Behavioral study of obedience[1]. From the abstract: This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive subject to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a ...

5

There is an unclear relationship between classical conceptions of a unitary view of mental workload to the modern constructs of cognitive psychology and neuroscience that are relevant to your question. This is partly because mental workload is tough to define, and also because it is far too coarse a construct given the extremely large variety of dynamic ...

5

I think you are doing the computation correctly, but Gigerenzer and Blank did not provide us with the full results of their experiment, preventing us from repeating their computations exactly: The data provided in columns 1 and 2 of the table are only the averages. The data in column 4 (Bayesian) is not a transformation of the average value using some ...

4

@CHCH has provided a good broad overview, but I thought I would also append some specific experiments that are considered to be a weakness of Bayesian models. The whole theme of this answer is an extension of Tversky and Kahneman's program of rationality-violation. All of these experiments can be fitted by some Bayesian-ish just-so model of the sort Bowers ...

4

The following are just my thoughts on what seems to make sense from first principles. I don't have a detailed understanding of what is standard practice in the wisdom of crowds literature. I've also only given what you've written a basic read. I.e., enough to understand the broad question, but not enough to follow exactly what you've done. Let $y_i$ be the ...

4

Presumably the decision of drivers to slow down in response to work zone signage is influenced by many factors. Signage and road factors: Presumably there are a wide range of factors related to the nature of the signs and the structure of the road setting that influence whether people slow down. For example, I've seen road work signage on freeways that ...

4

Check out this question on biology.stackexchange: Do omnivore mammals vary food preferences based on dietary needs? The answers in that question mention that experiments on Rats and Birds determined that there's an internal chemosensor, the anterior piriform cortex (APC) within bird and rat brains that senses lack of Indispensible Amino Acids (IAA). Animals ...

3

Intuition and implicit learning I recommend you have a read through Lieberman's (2000) review and theory article on intuition. Lieberman argues that intuition is a cognitive and behavioural consequence of implicit learning processes. Intuition is contrasted with more deliberate thought processes. It also reflects situations where it is often not possible ...

3

One possible strategy is to phrase decision-making problems as questions in a foreign language. There's evidence that this attenuates at least certain kinds of cognitive bias (making you more rational and consistent) by distancing the cognitive and affective baggage that comes with the problem. See the following: Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S.L., & Sun, G.A. ...

3

Could you be talking about conformity: e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity and/or groupthink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink ? In addition to the famous Milgram studies which you may have already heard about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment There's quite a lengthy literature on these issues but those links should get ...

2

As Piotr mentions in the comments, you must operationalize "better". Total time spent making a decision is likely to increase as the number of decision alternatives increase. This is known as Hick's Law. If each choice has some objective value, then the maximum possible value that could be attained is likely to increase as the number of decision ...

2

My colleagues have applied the COVIS model of category learning to the WCST. COVIS isn't a model of WCST performance per se, but can account for several known phenomena. See this Google Scholar search: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Helie+Paul+ashby&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

2

Yes, this does happen. It is called an information cascade. From Wikipedia: An information (or informational) cascade occurs when people observe the actions of others and then make the same choice that the others have made, independently of their own private information signals. There is lots of evidence that people will abandon their own opinions and ...

1

The book The Power of Habit brought up a tale in the first chapter about a man who lost the capability of storing long term memory because of brain damage. He could not remember conversations or TV shows he watched just 10 minutes ago. He could still walk and have normal conversations, just that he would repeat the same questions. However, his man was able ...

1

It may also be due to errors in perception. Our brains did not evolve to perceive/judge objects and distances while traveling at such high speeds and we may misjudge how fast we are actually going to how fast we think is safe. There are some studies out there that ask people how long the white dividing lines on freeways are (people always under estimate ...

1

Jonathan Baron's book, "Thinking and Deciding", presents decision making, and most other thinking tasks, as a combination of searching and judgment. In most cases, expanding the search phase results in better thinking. In the case of decision making, searching further both for more alternatives before judging between them and for better information for ...

1

Bogacz et al. (2006) provide the most comprehensive overview of models in this domain. This includes comparisons of the Drift Diffusion Model (Ratcliff, 1978), Ornstein–Uhlenbeck (O-U) Model (e.g. Busemeyer & Townsend, 1993; "Decision Field Theory"), race models without inhibition (e.g. Vickers, 1970), and race models with inhibition (e.g. Usher & ...

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