88-703 -
FALL 1997Human Judgment and Decision Making
TU/TH: 4:00 - 5:20 p.m. -
BH 231-BProfessor Robyn M. Dawes
Office: PH 219C; phone: 8-2055
Secretary: Carole Deaunovich
PH 208-I; phone: 8-3665
Office Hours: Tues. 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon and Wed. 3:30 - 5:00 p.m.; also by appointment.
As stated on the announcement, "the purpose of this course is to examine critically the research evidence" claimed to justify accepted principles of judgment and choice in the face of uncertainty. Students are expected to understand these principles on the basis of past course work in behavioral decision making or on the basis of reading Dawes' book, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. The focus of the course will be on evaluating observational and experimental results and conclusions. The format will be class discussion, most often led (somewhat actively) by Dawes.
Five to seven papers will be required reading in each of seven modules that will be discussed for approximately two weeks each. Students will be required to write "minor" critiques of two papers from each of the modules and a major critique of a third paper. The major one could include suggestions for future research. By 5:00 p.m. Dec. 12 students must also hand in a term paper involving an extension of one, or possibly two, of their earlier critiques. Again, this extension can involve suggestions for future research.
All but the final critique will be due at noon on the day of the class period on which discussion of the following module begins. The final one will be due at noon Dec. 3. Either put the set in my mailbox or give it to my secretary Carole Deaunovich. If the term paper is on the same topic as one of the critiques handed in on Dec. 3. I will make a special effort to provide feedback as soon as possible.
Minor critiques will be graded on a 5 point basis, major ones on a 10 point basis, and the term paper on a 40 point basis. The norm for minor critiques is 2-3 pages, for major ones, 3-6 pages and for the term paper 10-20 pages. There are a total of 180 points possible. In the past, 120 points when I grade on such a basis has distinguished between an A- and a B+. (Given that the purpose of the grading is to reinforce critical thinking rather than reading per se, a high number of points is not an automatic response to any paper that indicates in a coherent way that the material has been covered.) While attendance is not mandatory, class contribution may be used as a way of deciding between grades on a cusp. I must count papers handed in after noon the day they are due as late, so that finishing papers does not intrude on preparation or class time (-2 points if not in by noon of the due date, -4 if not in by noon preceding the next class meeting, and so on).
The seven modules will follow the chapters in Dawes' book--with the exception of Chapter 8. The material in that is covered extensively by Professor George Loewenstein in his graduate class in Human Decision Making. I suggest, however, that it be read as background material for Chapters 9-12.
The book Rational Choice in an Uncertain World is available in the textbook store. My personal copies of the papers will be available at the desk of Carole Deaunovich in PH 208-I. Students can copy them at their own expense for personal use on the departmental Xerox, or beg or borrow copies, or even go to a library to the relevant journals. (I'm sorry that we can no longer provide packets of readings.)
TO: Students in 88-703
FROM: Robyn Dawes
RE: Suggestions for "Critiques"
Ask yourself whether you find the conclusion or conclusions convincing. If so, why? Which particular data, analyses, or arguments convinced you. If not, why not? What is unclear, lacking, or outright wrong? What alternative interpretations or arguments might be plausible?
Further, if you are convinced (of course, that's a matter of degree), what follows, or what applications might the conclusion have, or what experiment might be done next? If not convinced, what would be necessary (usually in the form of further observations, or experimental data) to convince you? Or if you find alternative interpretations or arguments more convincing, what might be done to support these--hopefully at the same time it refutes the author? (again a matter of degree, or perhaps refutes the author in some ways but not in others).
One trick I use: Negation. Insert a "not" in an assertion, or imagine the opposite result. Does it make sense? If not (i.e., if the "not" is not believable on prior grounds), then either the assertion or the result convey little or no information. For example, consider the argument that psychopathology is due to low self-esteem--supported by the finding that people who are drunk all the time, or abuse spouses or children, or who go in and out of mental hospitals done't have high self-esteem. Ask yourself whether a finding that such people have as high self-esteem as anyone else would be at all plausible. What sort of (social) world would that be? My conclusion: The finding proves nothing at all about the origins of pathological behavior. (All mathematical arguments that X implies Y can be phrased in terms of showing that if X didn't imply Y then both Z and not-Z would be true. Since--accepting the Law of Contradiction--we believe that Z and not-Z cannot be both true, we accept that X implies Y
N.B. Don't apply my trick to the social world. The fact that someone chooses to say something at all may be important, even if its negation is absurd. For example, teammates aren't compelled to say that Lemieux is a wonderful person (just that he plays exceptionally); thus, the fact they say so in an interview does convey information, even though a world in which they say that he's an SOB in an interview after winning the Stanley Cup is indeed an implausible one.
MODULE 1: Dawes, Chapters 1 and 2: Aug. 26 - Sept. 4; critiques due Sept. 9.
Readings:
Chapter 1: Overview, Disjunction effect.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1995). Conflict resolution: A cognitive perspective. In K. Arrow, R. H. Mnookin, L. Ross, A. Tversky, & R. Wilson (Eds.), Barriers to Conflict Resolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Dawes, R. M. (in press). Behavioral decision making and judgment. Handbook of Social Psychology, especially section 1D6 on.
Tversky, A., & Shafir, E. (1992). The disjunction effect in choice under uncertainty. Psychological Science, 3, 305-309.
Chapter 2
Arkes, H., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Decision Processes, 35, 124-140.
Staw, B. M., & Ross, J. (1989). Understanding behavior in escalation situations. Science, 246, 216-220.
MODULE 2:
Dawes, Chapters 3, 4: Sept. 9 - Sept. 18; critiques due Sept. 23.Readings:
Chapter 3
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263-291.
McNeil, B. J., Pauker, S. G., Saks, H. C., Jr., & Tversky, A. (1982). On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. New England Journal of Medicine, 306, 1259-1262.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1986). Rational choice and the framing of decisions, The Journal of Business, 59, part 2, 5251-5278.
Shafir, E. (1993). Choosing versus rejecting: Why some options are both better and worse than others. Memory and Cognition, 21, 546-556.
Chapter 4
Thaler, R. (1980). Toward a positive theory of consumer choice. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, I, 39-60. Also sections 2 and 4 of Thaler, R. (1985). Mental accounting and consumer choice. Marketing Science, 4, 201-204, 208-214.
Simon, H. A. (1985). Human nature in politics: The dialogue of psychology with political science. American Political Science Review, 79, 293-304.
MODULE 3: Dawes, Chapter 5: Sept. 23 - Oct. 2; critiques due Oct. 7.
Readings:
Chapter 5
Furby, L. R. (1973). Interpreting regression toward the mean in developmental research. Developmental Psychology, 8, 172-179.
Doherty, M. E., Mynatt, C. R., Tweney, R. D., & Schiavo, M. D. (1979). Pseudodiagnosticity. Acta Psychologica, 43, 111-121.
Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., and Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-314. (You also might wish to read the subsequent controversy in Chance between Larkey, Smith, & Kadane versus Tversky & Gilovich, 1989, 2, No. 4.)
Wolf, F. M., Gruppen, L. D., & Billi, J. E. (1985). Differential diagnosis and the competing hypothesis heuristic--a practical approach to judgment under uncertainty and Bayesian probability. Journal of the American Medical Approach, 253, 2858-2862.
Bar-Hillel, M. (1990). Back to base rates. In Hogarth, R. M. (Ed.), Insights in Decision Making: A Tribute to Hillel J. Einhorn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200-216.
Wells, G. L. (1992). Naked statistical evidence of liability: Is subjective probability enough? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, (5), 739-752.
Dawes, R. M., Mirels, H. L., Gold, E., & Donahue, E. (1993). Equating inverse probabilities in implicit personality judgments. Psychological Science, 4, 396-400.
MODULE 4: Chapters 6, 7: Oct. 7 - Oct. 16; critiques due Oct. 21.
Readings:
Chapter 6
Ross, L., Amabile, T. M., & Steinmetz, J. L. (1977). Social roles, social controls, and biases in the social perception process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 485-494.
Combs, B., & Slovic, P. (1979). Newspaper coverage of causes of death. Journalism Quarterly, 56, 837-849.
Tversky, A., Slovic, P., & Kahneman, D. (1990). The causes of preference reversals. American Economic Review, 80, No. 1, 201-211.
Irwin, J. R., Slovic, P., Lichtenstein, S., & McClelland, G. H. (1993). Preference reversals and the measurement of environmental values. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 6, 5-18.
Chapter 7
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgments. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 293-315.
Miller, D. T., & Turnbull, W. (1990). The counterfactual fallacy: Confusing what might have been with what ought to have been. Social Justice Research, 4, 1-19. Also sections IV and V of Miller, D. T., McFarland, C., & Turnbull, W. (1990). Counterfactual thinking and social perception: Thinking about what might have been. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 317-331.
Kahneman, D., & Lovallo, D. (1993). Timid choices and bold forecasts: A cognitive perspective on risk taking. Management Science, 39, 17-31.
MODULE 5: Dawes, Chapter 9: Oct. 21 - Oct. 30; critiques due Nov. 4
Readings:
Chapter 9
Hardin, G. R. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162, 1243-1248. Also, the "criticisms of the commons theory" section of Hardin, G. (1991). In Andelson, R. V. (Ed.), The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons: Population and the Disguises of Providence. Savage, MD: Barns and Noble, 177-183.
Messick, D. M., & Sentis, K. (1983). Fairness, preference, and fairness bias. In Messick, D. M. & Cook, K. S. (Eds.), Equity Theory: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives. New York: Praeger.
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1986). Fairness as a constraint on profit seeking: Entitlements in the market. The American Economic Review, 76, No. 4, 728-741.
Dawes, R. M., & Thaler, R. H. (1988). Anomalies: Cooperation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2, 187-197.
Loewenstein, G. F., Thompson, L., & Bazerman, M. H. (1989). Social utility and decision making in interpersonal contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 426-441.
Dawes, R. M. (1991). Social dilemmas, economic self-interest, and evolutionary theory. In Brown, D. R., & Smith, J. E. K. (Eds.), Recent Research in Psychology: Frontiers of Mathematical Psychology: Essays in Honor of Clyde Coombs. New York: Springer-Verlag, 53-79. (To be reprinted in Coughlin, R. M. (Ed.), Morality, Rationality, and Efficiency: New Perspectives in Socio-Economics.
Dawes, R.M., & Orbell, J.M. The benefit of optional play in anonymous one-shot prisoner's dilemma games. In K. Arrow, R. Mnookin, L. Ross, A. Tversky, & R. Wilson (Eds.), Barriers to Conflict Resolution.. New York: Norton & Co. Publishers, 1995, 62-85.
MODULE 6: Dawes, Chapter 10: Nov. 4 - Nov. 13; critiques due Nov. 18.
Readings: Chapter 10
Einhorn, H. J., & Hogarth, R. M. (1978). Confidence in judgment: Persistence of the illusion of validity. Psychological Review, 85, 395-416.
Dawes, R. M., Faust, D., & Meehl, P. E. (1989). Clinical versus actuarial judgment. Science, 243, 1668-1674.
Redelmeier, D. A., & Tversky, A. (1990). Discrepancy between medical decisions for individual patients and for groups. New England Journal of Medicine, 322, 1162-1164.
McCauley, C. (1991). Selection of National Science Foundation fellows: A case study of psychologists failing to apply what they know about decision making. American Psychologist, 46, 1287-1291.
Rothbart, M., & Taylor, M. J. (1992). Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In Semin, G., & Fiedler, K. (Eds.), Language and Social Cognition, 11-35.
Grove, W. M. & Meehl, P. E. (1996). Comparative efficiency of informal (subjective, impressionistic) and formal (mechanical, algorithimic) prediction procedures: The clinical-statistical contoversy. Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 2, 293-323.
MODULE 7: Dawes, Chapters 11 and 12: Nov. 18 - Dec. 2; No class Nov. 27; critiques due Dec. 3.
Readings: Chapter 11
Landau, M. (1984). Human evolution as narrative. American Scientist, 72, 262-268.
Einhorn, H. J. (1986). Accepting error to make less error. Journal of Personality Assessment, 50, 387-395.
Dawes, R. M. (1993). The prediction of the future versus an understanding of the past: A basic asymmetry. American Journal of Psychology, 106, 1-24.
Chapter 12
Langer, E. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311-328.
Lerner, M. J. (1987). Integrating societal and psychological rules of entitlement: The basic task of each actor and fundamental problem for the social sciences. Social Justice Research, 1, 107-125.
March, J. G., and Shapira, Z. (1987). Managerial perspectives on risk and risk taking. Management Science, 33, 1404-1418.
Dec. 4: Professor Dawes will be available during regular class time to discuss term papers.