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Psychology of Personal Decision-Making. Balanced Judgment. Agenda. Balanced Judgment Recognition Limited Capacity Tools External Memory Lists Decision Tables/Trees De-cluttering Priming Heuristics Decomposition Worksheet – . Balanced Judgment. “Even-Handedness” Decisions
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Psychology of Personal Decision-Making Balanced Judgment
Agenda • Balanced Judgment • Recognition • Limited Capacity • Tools • External Memory • Lists • Decision Tables/Trees • De-cluttering • Priming • Heuristics • Decomposition • Worksheet –
Balanced Judgment • “Even-Handedness” • Decisions • Assigning appropriate “importance” to different values
A snarky meeting • No decision tables • No values on the table written down • How do you best affect outcome of decision? • Deliberating jury + phone call
Judgment + numbers = a baby. • Rankings • Ratings
Lack of Balanced Judgment Recognition • Rarely hear people complain about their memory • Clear inability to do something as a result • Lose Keys = Can’t open door • Failures in judgment are less clear • “I didn’t write all the options down so I picked this one and I’m in the process of synthesizing my happiness with it, so shut up and let me be”
Lack of Balanced Judgment: WARNING SIGNS • Single alternatives • Single values • Single futures • All considerations pointing to same alternative • Vacillation • Limited attention • Cognitive overload
Are you over-simplfying? • When presented with new information or a new alternative… • Emotionality and resistance? • Irrationality • Ready acceptance • Non-creative thought • Resistance + confusion + cognitive strain • No capacity to deal with this new information among other ideas
Limited Capacity • 1. Limited working memory • 2. Poor working memory distinctions
Tools to fix the lack of RAM • External Memory • Strings/Rubber Bands • Creating diagrams • Writing • Lists
Decision Tables and Trees • Ways to logically organize ideas • Without them, we “satisfice” • Confirmation Bias • Evaluate one alternative at a time until we find a good one • Could overlook important alternatives!
Priming • Mental “warm up” • Gets intermediate memory chugging • EX: Book read aloud while making cookies
Create new ideas? • Stimulus Generalization
Keep good ideas? • External Memory
Heuristics • Educated guesses to more EFFICIENTLY help solve problems • Lock-picker example • Tools: • Focus on big picture (breadth based) • Think backwards from the goal (value focused) • Improve your position (sub-goal analysis)
Decomposition • Break big problems into smaller pieces • Use the smaller solutions to solve bigger problems • EX: Environmentalists vs. Developers • Develop criteria: #jobs created, building code conformity • Rate importance • Differences Eliminated!