Herbert Simon's decision-making approach: Investigation of cognitive processes in experts

This is a post print version of the article. The official published can be obtained from the links below - PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.Herbert Simon's research endeavor aimed to understand the processes that participate in human decision making. However, despite his effort to investigate this question, his work did not have the impact in the “decision making” community that it had in other fields. His rejection of the assumption of perfect rationality, made in mainstream economics, led him to develop the concept of bounded rationality. Simon's approach also emphasized the limitations of the cognitive system, the change of processes due to expertise, and the direct empirical study of cognitive processes involved in decision making. In this article, we argue that his subsequent research program in problem solving and expertise offered critical tools for studying decision-making processes that took into account his original notion of bounded rationality. Unfortunately, these tools were ignored by the main research paradigms in decision making, such as Tversky and Kahneman's biased rationality approach (also known as the heuristics and biases approach) and the ecological approach advanced by Gigerenzer and others. We make a proposal of how to integrate Simon's approach with the main current approaches to decision making. We argue that this would lead to better models of decision making that are more generalizable, have higher ecological validity, include specification of cognitive processes, and provide a better understanding of the interaction between the characteristics of the cognitive system and the contingencies of the environment

Prospects and problems in modeling group decisions

This paper summarizes some of the major issues related to group decision modeling. We briefly review the existing work on group choice models in marketing and consumer research. We draw some generalizations about which models work well when and use those generalizations to provide guidelines for future research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47074/1/11002_2004_Article_BF00554128.pd

Faith in thy threshold

The current study focussed on the decision making processes of jurors. The study investigated how jurors make a decision, if they integrated information within their decision making process, and if cue utilisation thresholds promoted confirmation bias. To do this, 108 participants listened to one of nine cases. These participants were asked to give a likelihood of guilt rating after each piece of evidence, to state what was the last piece of information they needed to make a decision and give a final verdict at the end of a trial. The results highlighted that threshold decision making was being utilised, that information integration may allow thresholds to be reached and that thresholds may promote confirmation bias to reduce cognitive dissonance. In conclusion, this suggests that jurors integrate information until they reach a leading verdict, then the evaluation of information is distorted to support the leading threshold. Implications relate to von Dire and legal instructions

Monitoring clinical quality in rare disease services – experience in England

After some well-publicised problems with paediatric cardiac surgery, there has been great interest in England in monitoring clinical quality in specialised medical services. The National Commissioning Group plans, funds and monitors a set of highly specialised services for the National Health Service in England. We have developed systems for monitoring clinical quality that perform two interrelated but distinct functions: performance measurement and performance improvement. The aim is to collect information on all patients seen during each year – a 100% consecutive case series. Generally, there is no conceptual difficulty identifying an appropriate outcome for surgical interventions: the indication for surgery usually defines the outcome to monitor. This is not so for the medical and psychiatric services, where the relevant outcome to monitor is sometimes not obvious. There are a number of problems in interpreting, and acting on, outcome data for rare conditions and treatments. These problems include statistical problems due to small numbers, the need to risk adjust data and coding problems

Opening out and closing down: The treatment of uncertainty in transport planning’s forecasting paradigm

© 2019, The Author(s). Since the 1960s, development of the transport system has been framed by the notion of forecasting future demand. Yet the past decade or more appears to signal some significant changes to the role of travel in society which are having a material impact on how much people travel (and may travel in the future). Coupled with the potential for major technological changes and a range of climate adaptation scenarios, the future of mobility presents today’s decision making on transport strategy and investment with a broader set of uncertainties than has previously been considered. This paper examines current mainstream practice for incorporating uncertainty into decision-making, through an illustrative case study of the highly codified approaches of the Department for Transport in England. It deconstructs the issue by first focussing on different ways in which there is an opening out or acceptance of new uncertainties and how this creates a (wider) set of potential futures. It then turns to consider how this set of futures is used, or not, in decision-making, i.e. the process of closing down uncertainty to arrive at or at least inform a decision. We demonstrate that, because the range of uncertainties has broadened in scope and scale, the traditional technocratic approach of closing down decisions through sensitivity testing is at odds with the greater breadth now being called for at the opening out stage. We conclude that transport decision-making would benefit from a rebalancing of technical depth with analytical breadth. The paper outlines a plausible new approach to opening out and closing down that is starting to be applied in practice. This approach must be accompanied by an opening up of the processes by which technical advice for decisions are reached and how uncertainties are understood and negotiated

Biased decision making in realistic extra-procedural nuclear control room scenarios

In normal operations and emergency situations, operators of nuclear control rooms rely on procedures to guide their decision making. However, in emergency situations, where several interacting problems can cause unpredictable adverse effects, these procedures may be insufficient in guiding operators to safe shutdown of the power plant. Little is known about the decision making strategies that operators employ in these extra-procedural situations. To address this, a realistic simulation study was conducted with five crews of active, licensed nuclear operators to see the behavioural patterns that occur when procedures are not sufficient. This paper, a re-analysis of a dataset collected for a different study, investigates how the design and existence of procedures influence, and possibly bias, decision making strategies. We found evidence that operators were affected by confirmation bias, and that, in some cases, the mismatch between their home power plant and the simulated power plant made them commit errors due to misapplied expertise. We further found that this effect was amplified by the existence and design of the procedures used. Based on these findings, we suggest that designers may improve safety by creating procedures that bear the risks of these biases in mind, or by specifically aiming to debias the users. Avenues for debiasing through design are discussed

The role of expertise in dynamic risk assessment: A reflection of the problem-solving strategies used by experienced fireground commanders

Although the concept of dynamic risk assessment has in recent times become more topical in the training manuals of most high risk domains, only a few empirical studies have reported how experts actually carry out this crucial task. The knowledge gap between research and practice in this area therefore calls for more empirical investigation within the naturalistic environment. In this paper, we present and discuss the problem solving strategies employed by sixteen experienced operational firefighters using a qualitative knowledge elicitation tool — the critical decision method. Findings revealed that dynamic risk assessment is not merely a process of weighing the risks of a proposed course of action against its benefits, but rather an experiential and pattern recognition process. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of designing training curriculum for the less experienced officers using the elicited expert knowledge