Overall Summary of Judgement and Decision Making!

For our final piece of coursework for judgement and decision making we had to do a group presentation. Our group chose to do Utility and the three of us looked at different articles. Mine was on dissecting the risky choice framing effect by Peters and Levin (2008). This article looked at the 5 Variants Asian choice disease, first proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1981) which was an early example of the malleability of human decision making. The main point of the article was to look at the differences framing has on the highly numerate participant’s and the less numerate participant’s. Overall the less numerate showed a greater susceptibility to the framing.  During the presentation I had to analyse and summarise this article. For me I have found judgement and decision making to be very interesting yet challenging. The reasons why people make different judgements and decisions based on cognitive processes. Are they risk adverse or risk seeking? Why do people make certain decisions? What variables affect decisions? For me personally I think that there are many individual factors in making decisions, such as what the consequence of that decision will be. One must keep in mind that most decisions are made unconsciously. Jim Nightingale, Author of Think Smart-Act Smart, states that "we simply decide without thinking much about the decision process."  There were therefore many aspects of decision making that I found interesting such as probability and utility theory, and the way in which a choice is framed affects an individual’s decision.  From judgment and decision making I have learnt that my intuition when it comes to making my own decisions (especially in probability) are quite inaccurate. However I have also learnt that I am not risk seeking.

Overall Judgment and decision making has opened my eyes about the way in which I make decisions and has made me more aware of the individual factors that affect individual’s decisions. There are so many numerous psychological factors and events within decision making, including moral intuitions and performance, intuitive and heuristic modes of evaluating and choosing, conscious reasoning modeled after Western logic, and the factors and biases that affect one's choice of choosing method and the performance of the method itself. As with all mental processes, within this general topic are the cognitive and biological factors that control the uses of the various psychological processes in regards to decisions.