Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making
by: Scott Plous
Topics include:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING offers a comprehensive introduction to the field with a strong focus on the social aspects of decision making processes. Winner of the prestigious William James Book Award, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING is an informative and engaging introduction to the field written in a style that is equally accessible to the introductory psychology student, the lay person, or the professional. A unique feature of this volume is the Reader Survey which readers are to complete before beginning the book. The questions in the Reader Survey are drawn from many of the studies discussed throughout the book, allowing readers to compare their answers with the responses given by people in the original studies. This title is part of The McGraw-Hill Series in Social Psychology.
Does not answer "How to make better decisions":
After reading this book, your ability to make better decisions will improve a whopping zero. If you 1)want to learn how to make better decisions 2)like to save money because it is precious 3)never enjoyed that Psych 101 course in college despite upper classmen swearing you into believing you will learn the tricks to get the hottest babes, then do not buy this book. On the other hand, if you were a geek like me and enjoyed the self torture in order to obtain intellectual enlightment, then this book is definitely for you. This book will cites what seems like 2 million case studies to show you that humans cannot make right decisions worth crap. I kept reading this book to find the "how to" section on making right decisions, but there was none, making my decision to buy and read this book a wrong one.
Reviews:
Introductory and readable summary on this topic
This is my first book on psychology for self-study. As the author puts in the preface, "the focus is on experimental findings rather than psychological theory, surprising conclusions rather than intuitions, and descriptive prose rather than mathematics."
The author tends to use nuclear weapon, war, and clinical examples more often than other topics in order to illustrate concepts. The examples are taken from actual empirical researches, including laboratory ones. Due to the purpose of the textbook, the examples are used to explain concepts, rather than to show how an experiment is designed or how "good" the experiment is in the sense of cause and effect. The bibliography list is correspondingly large given only some 260 pages. The author does not forget to provide tips on how to avoid particular biases presented in a given chapter. No exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, but a special section READER SURVEY given after preface asks you to answer 39 questions to be used in the main part of the text. No glossary is provided.
As I read through, I have warned myself not to generalize research results presented to be directly applicable to my life without careful thoughts. From my nave point of view and based only on materials presented in the book, these research findings may be internally valid, but never guaranteed to work in any other circumstances or contexts. Such context dependence is treated explicitly in Chapter 4, but it all applies to any other concepts discussed throughout the book. The author warns this point to readers at the end of the book in Appendix. My suggestion for the next revision would be to include informal yet usable introduction on how to design an experiment that anyone could conduct without specialized devices or environment, so that readers can test biases that may be present in their own contexts.
As an example, having been an Amazon customer for a while, I see more votes on "yes" for reviews 4 and 5 stars than those on "no" for reviews 3 and below. The page is designed such that unaware people see most helpful review first, then most recent review in decreasing order by default. Your impression toward a book may change if you sort reviews by least helpful first or lowest rating first. Biases may be present in your purchase decision making processes. If you are curious about knowing some characterizations and explanations for them, this book may be for you.
This is a fascinating book analyzing how we are all far less Cartesian than we think. In other words, a slew of predictable human bias flaws what we feel is our own objective judgment. The author eminently demonstrates this point by forcing the reader to take a 39 questions test at the beginning of the book. This test is stuffed with all the traps that illustrate the human judgment flaws that he analyzes thoroughly in following specific chapters. You can view the test as a very entertaining IQ test from hell. The questions seem often simple. But, they are not. Other times, they are obviously difficult. I got a bit more than half of them correct. This was mainly because I had some knowledge or experience regarding certain traps the questions presented. I had made the mistake before. So, I learned from that. When I did not have any prior knowledge of a question, my results were very human, meaning not that good. But, learning the correct answer was both fun and educating. The author touches on several fascinating probability and statistic concepts. One of them being the Bayes theorem, which suggests that medical screen test can be highly unreliable despite being touted as 80% to 90% accurate. In other words, you better understand the Bayes theorem better than the medical specialists who screen you for various diseases. Because, based on the author's study, doctors don't have a clue. Another chapter had an excellent discussion on correlation vs. causation. This includes some tricky nuances that many analysts in the financial industry trip upon. Another interesting probability concept is why it takes only 23 people in a room to have greater than a 50% that two of them share the same birthday. This seems impossible, but it is true. The book has obviously a lot more than I am letting on here. I am not going to ruin it for you. It is really fun, educating, and interesting to read. You will also learn a whole lot about how you think, how others think, and how people think in groups. You will also understand how tricky it is to ask truly open and objective questions. Also, polls that seem objective are not due to the subjective structure of the question. I think you will enjoy this book, and I strongly recommend it.
Judging Judgment and Decision Making: A decade ago Scott Plous produced a very readable summary of research in social psychology and (what is now known as) behavioral economics. Our understanding of how people actually behave (as opposed to our theories as to how they should behave) has been immeasurably enriched by work dating (variously) from Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Stanley Milgram and many others. Management education has yet to fully take into account the many insights coming from psychologists, experimental economists and others so nicely summarized in this book.
I write this from the perspective of a social and market researcher, and thought I was quite aware of many of the nuances and pitfalls that can render our scientific research somewhat open to question. But Scott Plous, with his vivid, lively writing style, his acute logic and well chosen case studies shows what a hell of a minefield it is that we work in. The Psychology of Judgment and Decisionmaking is a rich resource book of human insight that is at once vitally useful (this book has opened me up to new insights and led me to rethink many aspects of research design) and awfully humbling: there's a pair of pie charts on Page 54 that show that whatever questions we may have about margins of error, the way we happen to phrase the question may well have a much larger effect. In total, Plous entertains, he shares wise insights and he challenges the reader. I wish Amazon had room for 6 stars. I'd give this one 7.
This is a very dense book, relatively easy to read, and very2 helpful. I love Blink and The Tipping Point, but this book probably has much much more materials, arguably more than 5 times of inside that those two best sellers combined.
I am very interested in the popular psycology stuffs, and Influence by Cialdini is my fav. So this book in some way give you the same chockful of surprises and new insight that will change the way you think.
I came across recomended by a University of Chicago MBA -email friend- who has much similar books favourites and he recomended this highly, and i absolutely agree and i would be glad to recommend this to anyone interested in human behaviour and psychology of bias.
MBA students should read this one and surely will enjoy this. I always draw, marks and put notes on my book and i think i end up marking so much of the materials.
Section one: Perception, Memory and Context
Section two: How Questions affect answers
Section three: Model of Decision making
Section Four: Heurictis and Biases.
Section five: The Social side of judgment and decision making
Section six: Common traps.
Some will complain that this book derived from a lot of previous psychological research, i agree, so for the psychology veteran out there, this might not the right book for you, but for most of us, this book will enlight, entertain and amuse us all...