Second Lecture (week 3)

I am writing a couple of days after my second lecture, because of the strike we had no lecture in the second week. Instead we did the reading (Reasoning the fast and frugal Way: Models of bounded Rationality by G, Gigerenzer and D,G, Goldstein), and in class we discussed it in our groups then summarized it to the class.

The article firstly looks at the different theories of how humans and other species make inferences about unknown aspects of the environment. It begins with the classical view that the judgements and decisions we make are merely laws of probability and statistics, not a lot of logic. It argues that the mind uses quick, simple processes or algorithms as a tool to makes inferences about the world. This enlightenment view was highly criticized for being too simple and unrealistic. Even for treating the mind as a 'laplacean demon' or a super calculator, because it looks at all available information.

The article we read argued that we make judgements just based on on cue rather than looking at all available knowledge (take the best ignore the rest!). For example if the question was asked: which is the biggest city A) or B) and the participant knows A has a university and B does not then they will pick A to be the biggest city, rather than looking at all the cues available (the classical view). Above is a flow chart of this process. Test results backed up this take the best theory showing that it was just as accurate as the other theories and can be preformed in a quicker time.

I am unsure were i stand in this debate on reasoning. I think that obviously we often make snap decisions and judgements which don't require much thinking or processing of information. However i know from my experience i often take a long time to make a decision and do take the time to think about more than just one cue, these sorts of decisions cannot be as simple as these theories suggest. However when we are put into a situation where we have to make a very fast decision i can see that we may base it on just one cue.

At first i found the article a little hard going as there was a lot of information to take in and it was quite long. It took me along time to read and i was worried i had not fully grasped the over all concept. However, when we got into groups in class it was really helpful to discuss it, i was able to fill in some of the gaps and see what every one else made of it. At the end we did a small presentation on one part of the paper. It went okay, but although i had it clear in my head, it was hard to put it across in the correct words and explain it to those who had not read the article. I think with practice this will become easier. After our presentation the other groups talked about their papers on how judges and professionals make fast judgements, and whether they look at all the information or base decisions on what they believe is one most important cue. It was interesting because one would think that judges are very fair and take all information into account but it would seem that sometimes they do not.

Next weeks reading is on priority heuristics and making choices without trade-offs. I plan to start this on Monday so I'll see how i get on with that.

(Diagram reprinted by permission of the American Psychological Association).