Revision session

This week our lecture only lasted an hour, as it was a revision session we went over ,as a class, all the different topics we've covered so far. From fast and frugal reasoning to framing effects and the endowment theory.
I have to say i have found the topic of judgment and decision making really interesting and at times surprising. I find it especially shocking that even as humans with free will and the capability to make our own independent decisions and judgements, that we often have confidence are the correct and truthful ones, can usually be predicted and irrational. Take the mug and candy experiment ,i spoke about earlier in the endowment effect blog, for example, it shows it is possible to predict that if you are endowed with a good your more likely to stick with it rather than swap it with something of similar value. This is an irrational decision as your not picking the one you like the most but the one you had to start off with.
We have also learnt that our thinking which results in a decision or judgement being made may be like a very simple algorithm. Take the best algorithm, for example, argues we can base decisions on just one cue rather than looking at all the available information, i find i often do this when making quick snap decisions. This can understandably lead to irrational and inaccurate decisions, which is a scary thought as decisions people make can have a large impact on others, for instance jurors decisions in court! ( which i will be looking into further for my last wiki)
Lastly, a finding from the reading i recently did on framing effects, that the wording of a question has an effect on peoples choices even if they have time to think about their answer, really surprised me. Before i had given this subject any thought i did think that as humans our decisions are relatively rational and accurate. However reading the findings about the disease problem and many others proved my initial thoughts to be wrong! Thinking about it now however, and finding that even i was effected by framing effects in the disease problem, i realise that there are many factors that can influence our beliefs about things and they can easily become illogical and unreasonable, even if after careful consideration of the choice being made!
Now i am starting my reading for our last wiki, jury decision making. I am hoping that for this wiki our group will be a little bit more organised than the last one, we will have to make sure every one has done their bit in time to meet up as a group and discuss the overall piece of work. We have found it hard to allocate each person to a certain topic in the subject so that we all have an equal part in the wiki. Also We need to start preparing soon for our presentation on one of the papers which will take place on our very last lecture.

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