Judgement First Lecture

This is my first entry and was surprised how easy it is to set up!
I am in my final year and one of my three modules this semester is judgement and decision making. My first lecture for this was last Friday. My first impression of the module was that i liked the way it was assessed. Rather than doing essays and exams it’s comprised of reading, group work and participation in class which I think I will prefer. Although sometimes I have to really push myself to participate, i think it will be very good practise and help me become more confident.

I did the reading for the first lecture (Hardman 2009)chapters 1 and 2, which was on judgement and decision making which I found quite interesting, looking at conscious and unconscious decisions and the dual system. I also found rationality interesting, which is adhrence to a normative model, or behaving in a 'normal' way in a given situation. Some say this is learnt by gaining experience in a certain domain. However ther is evidence of irrational behaviour in people who are experienced in a domain. An example of this is visual illusions, take the illusion in the top left hand corner, (the online optical illusion of Muller-Lyer). even when you are told that both the horizontal lines are equall you still see them as the same length! A further example of irrational judgements is when people do not focus on immediate concerns, for example, not saving for a pension or smoking and drinking heavily when you are young. I can see how this is very true to everyday life as i often do not think about future consequences when i am 'in the moment' eg, spending all my money in one shopping trip!

We had a discussion about that and other approaches to understanding why we make decisions and also what exactly a good decision is. Then we formed groups. I am glad we get to work in groups instead of alone, this way we can discuss the reading between ourselves before we present it to the class so it’s clear in our minds!

I am in the process of doing the reading for the next lecture, reasoning the fast and frugal way by Gigerenzer and Goldstein. This reading is taking me along time to take it all in but its still very interesting. Then I will get in touch with my group to discuss. As we don't have a lecture next week because of the strike in our groups we will still do written work on "wiki", and discuss the reading on fast and frugal reasoning in class.

Above i have posted a picture of David's book Judgement and Desision Making (Hardman 2009). I plan to buy it as it is essentail reading in this module. Hopefully i can get it from amazon! i will write an update before my next lecture on how the reading has gone.
Alice.

references:
Hardman, D.(2009). Judgment and Decision Making: Psychological Perspectives. Chichester, UK: BPS-Blackwell.