Five steps towards avoiding narrative traps in decision-making

Narratives provide simple rules about how we ought to live and what our priorities ought to be. They are especially appealing in times of high uncertainty. Using the uncertainty surrounding Covid-19 as an illustration, we show how a narrative to preserve life has become dominant, and we illustrate how it has been reinforced by several behavioural biases. We argue that being able to identify and critically evaluate the impact of dominant narratives is vital to ensuring optimal decision-making. To facilitate this, we offer five recommendations – the ABCDE of decision-making – that can help to reduce the “narrative trap” in decision-making in any uncertain environment

Narrative traps: how can we avoid them in making decisions about COVID?

How have we made decisions about handling COVID-19? Did they take account of trade-offs to individual welfare, or were they prone to narrative bias? Amanda Henwood (LSE) discusses a recent report written with Paul Dolan (LSE) which introduces a new framework – the ABCDE of decision-making – to alert decision-makers to the narrative traps that influence their decisions, including in high-risk situations such as the pandemic

Facing Attrition: The Lived Experiences of Emerging Adult Teachers in Public Education

This multiple case study was conducted for the purpose of exploring the developmental readiness of emerging adult teachers in relation to teacher attrition. Introduction to the notion of development in relation to teacher readiness was explored specifically in response to the rate of attrition among emerging adult teachers and the overall decline in student achievement and the perpetuations of America’s achievement and opportunity gaps. Consideration of readiness in respect to cognitive and psychological development were explored using the tenets of Jeffrey Arnett’s theory of Emerging Adulthood with a total of six study participants. Specifically, this study examined the impact of life decisions in relation to identity formation occurring between the ages of 18 and 29. With emerging adults being precariously and metaphorically affixed in a position of having one foot in adulthood and the other in adolescence, this study sought to reveal relevant factors that attributed to both the professional and personal identity of emerging adult teachers who had left the teaching profession. With the focus of this study providing a perspective for attrition- from a developmental perspective, it is hoped that the knowledge gained from this study will add to the further research and dialogue on attrition, and lead to further studies in the future focusing specifically in the area of developmental psychology.Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)School of Educatio

The Story of a Clast

First paragraph: What can one sample of vitrified rock – known as a clast – tell us of its creation? Formed in the great fire of Dun Deardail, our clast formed as minerals melted, glueing together bits of rock. What stories are hidden in it? What can it tell us about the vitrification event of Dun Deardail? We can look at this clast using differing scales of analysis from the hand-held samples examined with the naked eye, down to the microscopic analysis of single elements. Combined, the information contained at each scale can help write the story of the construction and destruction of the hillfort

The duration of daily activities has no impact on measures of overall wellbeing

It is widely assumed that the longer we spend in happier activities the happier we will be. In an intensive study of momentary happiness, we show that, in fact, longer time spent in happier activities does not lead to higher levels of reported happiness overall. This finding is replicated with different samples (student and diverse, multi-national panel), measures and methods of analysis. We explore different explanations for this seemingly paradoxical finding, providing fresh insight into the factors that do and do not affect the relationship between how happy we report feeling as a function of how long it lasts. This work calls into question the assumption that spending more time doing what we like will show up in making us happier, presenting a fundamental challenge to the validity of current tools used to measure happiness

Better the devil you know: are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

Most people want to be both happy and healthy. But which matters most when there is a trade-off between them? This paper addresses this question by asking 4,000 members of the public in the UK and the US to make various trade-offs between being happy or being physically healthy. The results suggest that these trade-offs are determined in substantial part by the respondent's own levels of happiness and health, with happier people more likely to choose happy lives and healthier people more likely to choose healthy ones: "better the devil you know, than the devil you don't". Age also plays an important role, with older people much more likely to choose being healthy over being happy. We also test for the effect of information when a randomly chosen half of the sample are reminded that it is possible to be happy without being healthy. Information matters, but much less so than who we are. These results serve to further our understanding of the aetiology of people's preferences and have important implications for policymakers who are concerned with satisfying those preferences

Automated Annotation-Based Bio-Ontology Alignment with Structural Validation

We outline the structure of an automated process to both align multiple bio-ontologies in terms of their genomic co-annotations, and then to measure the structural quality of that alignment. We illustrate the method with a genomic analysis of 70 genes implicated in lung disease against the Gene Ontology

Money Stories: Financial resilience among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians

This report builds on previous work on financial resilience in Australia and represents the beginning of an exploration of the financial resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Overall, we found significant economic disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This is not surprising, given the histories of land dispossession, stolen wages and the late entry of Indigenous Australians into free participation in the economy (it is only 50 years since the referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as members of the Australian population)

Exploring what lies behind public preferences for avoiding health losses caused by lapses in healthcare safety and patient lifestyle choices

© 2013 Singh et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Although many studies have identified public preferences for prioritising health care interventions based on characteristics of recipient or care, very few of them have examined the reasons for the stated preferences. We conducted an on-line person trade-off (PTO) study (N=1030) to investigate whether the public attach a premium to the avoidance of ill health associated with alternative types of responsibilities: lapses in healthcare safety, those caused by individual action or lifestyle choice; or genetic conditions. We found that the public gave higher priority to prevention of harm in a hospital setting such as preventing hospital associated infections than genetic disorder but drug administration errors were valued similar to genetic disorders. Prevention of staff injuries, lifestyle diseases and sports injuries, were given lower priority. In this paper we aim to understand the reasoning behind the responses by analysing comments provided by respondents to the PTO questions. Method: A majority of the respondents who participated in the survey provided brief comments explaining preferences in free text responses following PTO questions. This qualitative data was transformed into explicit codes conveying similar meanings. An overall coding framework was developed and a reliability test was carried out. Recurrent patterns were identified in each preference group. Comments which challenged the assumptions of hypothetical scenarios were also investigated. Results: NHS causation of illness and a duty of care were the most cited reasons to prioritise lapses in healthcare safety. Personal responsibility dominated responses for lifestyle related contexts, and many respondents mentioned that health loss was the result of the individual’s choice to engage in risky behaviour. A small proportion of responses questioned the assumptions underlying the PTO questions. However excluding these from the main analysis did not affect the conclusions. Conclusion: Although some responses indicated misunderstanding or rejection of assumptions we put forward, the results were still robust. The reasons put forward for responses differed between comparisons but responsibility was the most frequently cited. Most preference elicitation studies only focus on eliciting numerical valuations but allowing for qualitative data can augment understanding of preferences as well as verifying results.EPSRC through the MATCH programme(EP/F063822/1 and EP/G012393/1) and HERG within Brunel University