Todd Suomela's Library tagged decision-making →  View Popular, Search in Google

"Starting off in political science and then moving through several disciplinary domains such as management theory, psychology, sociology, economics, organization and institutional theory, March’s academic career has been focused on understanding and analyzing human decision making and behavior. The basic thesis that he has pursued is that human action is neither optimal (or unboundedly rational) nor random, but nevertheless reasonably comprehensible (March, 1978, 1994, 1999). The ideas that were developed to understand human behavior in organizations in March’s early work in the analysis of how people deal with an uncertain and ambiguous world included, among other things, the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing "

organizations rationality boundaries limits institutions business management decision-making leadership

While there is an extensive literature on the potential wisdom of human emotion – David Hume was a prescient guy – it’s only in the last few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those involving lots of variables. If true, this would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we’ve long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be more intelligent, at least in some conditions.

emotion psychology cognition thinking decision-making complexity

wall-street protests activism consensus decision-making experience personal

"What’s more, short-termism can protect us from two cognitive biases.
One is overconfidence. Given that the long-term future is unknowable, investment in long-term projects is often founded upon overconfidence about one’s predictions; this might be true for high speed rail. Short-termism offsets this.
The other bias is the planning fallacy. Complex projects take longer and cost more than expected. Had we had a little more short-termism, we’d not have wasted hundreds of millions on rejigging NHS IT systems or on building a tram system in Edinburgh."

long-term short-term time decision-making politics markets

consensus decision decision-making failure groups

"There it is. Job creators hate future taxes, and unemployment insurance has left our workforce weak, so don’t expect unemployment to come down anytime soon.

For all the fancy math, this logic is very similar to Fisher. ”Now suppose that, for the reasons just mentioned, p fell by 10 percent in the past three years and z increased by 0.05 during this period” is about as close to a “gut” feeling and “gut” reasoning as you can get. This appears to be how one of the most powerful people in the world for determining the future of the United States’ economy is determining his dissent from Bernanke’s position."

unemployment decision-making models econometrics macroeconomic economics recession

"It is still an open question when groups will perform better than individuals in intellectual tasks. We report that in a company takeover experiment, groups placed better bids than individuals and substantially reduced the winner’s curse. This improvement was mostly due to peer pressure over the minority opinion and to group learning. Learning took place from interacting and negotiating consensus with others, not simply from observing their bids. When there was disagreement within a group, what prevailed was not the best proposal but the one of the majority. Groups underperformed with respect to a “truth wins” benchmark although they outperformed individuals deciding in isolation. "

groups collective-intelligence decision-making performance intelligence

"One thing that has often irked me is the criticism politicians get for making U-turns. What’s wrong with changing your mind if new information comes to light?
A new paper by Armin Falk and Florian Zimmermann of the University of Bonn sheds light on my puzzlement. People, they say, value consistency in themselves and in others as a way of signalling intellectual strength.
And this value is an intrinsic one. We don’t just like consistency because it is a means to better decision-making. We value it even if it gets in the way of rational decisions."

psychology consistency signals bias rationality decision-making

""The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things.""

cognition psychology bias decision-making argument evolution rationality reasoning theory confirmation-bias belief justification

Description: Underlying the climate change crisis is a crisis in our collective ability to make decisions that support sustainability. This video highlights the connection between the challenges of responding to climate change and the capacities needed to engage in effective democratic decision making. It indicates that research in adult development helps us to understand these 21 century capacities. Public deliberation through deliberative democracy, when designed to support adult development, holds the possibility of improving our capacities to respond to complex public issues.

This video includes environmentalists Thomas Homer Dixon and Lester Brown , evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, developmental specialists Robert Kegan, and Bill Torbert, and deliberative democracy and complexity specialists Shawn Rosenberg, Jan Inglis and Sara Ross

video environment decision-making science

public planning cooperative commons wiki decision-making

"Author of the landmark study The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry offers a stunning and original analysis of the “claim of emergency.”

For sixty years, modern democratic governments have undermined democracy and increased executive power by invoking the idea of emergency. They have bypassed constitutional provisions concerning presidential succession, the declaration of war, the use of torture, civilian surveillance, and the arrangements for nuclear weapons. In the desire for swift national action, we citizens devalue thinking and ignore ways to check government power, plunging our countries into a precarious state between monarchy and democracy. Drawing on the work of philosophers, neuroscientists, and artists, Elaine Scarry proves decisively that thinking and rapid action are compatible. Practices that we dismiss as mere habit and protocol instead represent rigorous, effective modes of thought that we must champion in times of crisis. Scarry’s bold claim on behalf of fundamental democratic principles will enliven and enrich the ongoing debate about leadership."

book publisher emergency democracy government crisis propaganda surveillance shock-doctrine thinking decision-making

in list: Books Noted

psychology confidence bias decision-making overconfidence evolution evolutionary-psychology

"According to construal level theory (CLT) [Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Physical Review, 110, 403–421], psychological representation of information depends on “psychological distance”, that is, on whether the relevant information refers to the near or distant psychological space. While CLT was originally developed to account for intertemporal choice, Trope and Liberman proposed that it could account for other dimensions of psychological distance such as social distance. We follow up on Trope and Liberman’s proposal and demonstrate how CLT accounts for a wide range of economic behaviors such as predicting the choices of others, advice giving, saving for retirement, and the failure to annuitize assets at retirement. By explaining how CLT can account for these various economic behaviors and suggesting novel predictions, we hope to stimulate researchers to investigate further the role of psychological distance in economic behavior."

psychology choice rationality rational decision-making perspective near-far construal-level-theory

"Speechifiers through the ages, including policy makers today, usually talk as if they want decisions to be made in far mode. We should try to live up to our ideals, they preach, at least regarding far-away decisions. But our reluctance to use contracts to enable more far mode control over our actions suggests that while we tend to talk as if we want more far mode control, we usually act to achieve more near mode control. "

psychology choice rationality rational decision-making perspective near-far

economics expertise decision-making analysis recession crisis understanding explanation theory free-markets ideology

summaries and pointers to some research papers on topic of gender and decisions

gender decision-making decision choice

economics biology neurology hormones rational-markets decision-making decision

conspiracy uncanny-valley rationality decision-making

A new meta-analysis of 72 studies, involving 4,795 groups and over 17,000 individuals has shown that groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions.

groups group behavior groupthink decision-making information crowdsourcing bias