Decision Making

Humans are said to be ‘predictably irrational’, departing from the ways that economists would like to think they will behave. Businesses, policy makers, marketers and consultants and increasingly economists would all like to understand how and why people make the decisions they do. The judgment and decision making topic focuses on these questions and has produced a number influential models capturing how people choose between options, often emphasizing heuristics (or computational shortcuts) we use to make choices with limited time or computational resources and trying to explicate when and why they work.

Primary Readings

Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss:

• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. science, 211(4481), 453-458.
• Todd, P. M., & Gigerenzer, G. (2000). Précis of simple heuristics that make us smart. Behavioral and brain sciences, 23(5), 727-741. (main article only! do not need to read commentaries)

Questions under discussion

• Is the brain an adaptive toolbox or a flexible generalist?
• Are heuristic and probablistic frameworks really in tension?
• What are some key heuristics for decision making?
• What kind of theory is Prospect theory? Normative, descriptive or prescriptive?

Emotions

Historically, emotions were viewed as something separate from logic, rationality, and decision making—and often even viewed as directly opposed to these things. Perhaps partially for this reason, emotions (especially in the context of decision making) have been far less well-studied than many other aspects of cognition.

However, from personal experience, you probably appreciate that emotions are a huge part of our mental lives, impacting not just how we feel but also how we think, what we want, what we decide, etc. Recent research has started to examine the substantial roles that emotions play in guiding our judgment and decision making processes.

Primary Readings

Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss:

• Lerner, J. S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K. S. (2015). Emotion and decision making. Annual review of psychology, 66(1), 799-823.

Questions under discussion

• How do emotions differ from other types of cognitive processes that we have discussed?
• In addition to behavioral research, it becomes even more interesting to think about how emotions might be modeled computationally. What kinds of information processing mechanisms do emotions represent?
• What kinds of evolutionary pressures do you think led to the emergence of emotions in humans?
• Do animals have emotions? Do they differ from human emotions?