Judgment and decision making

Judgment and Decision Making is a classical area in scientific psychology, with origins in a little known discipline called "Mathematical Psychology". Though this concept is totally old-fashioned, I bring it here for the interesting thoughts that provokes to me: it is another piece of the history of the "Psychological approach" to the scientific problems of explaining the human behaviour.

I read several papers by Amos Tversky (and inseparable Daniel Kahneman) during my graduate courses, and I was so happy that Kahneman was finally Nobel prize of Economy (2002), but had never really seen an image of them. But there are some TV programs (in one corner you can see one moment 1989 -this is the year I finished my graduate university courses) that show them, again together, explaining the "heuristics and biases" in judgment and decision making. Here they are (3 parts, easily found in youtube). They are TV programs by Philip Zimbardo, himself a famous psychologist who carried out the Stanford Prison experiment. (For me clearly outside the ethics of psychological research, but, as we have seen recently, so close to actual human behaviour).

-As usual, wikipedia is hugely informativeā€¦ This will require more insight, and I am amazed by the effect of this into this Zimbardo. After being an expert for the Court judging Abu Ghraib, he studied what he called "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil", with a book (Random House, 2007), a film, and even a TED talk by Zimbardo. Please please have a look at this.

Coming back to our aim today about judgment and decision making. Zimbardo presented a TV series called "Discovering Psychology", and one of them is devoted to Judgment and Decision Making. In youtube it is divided in three parts:

1.- In this first part Tversky and Kahneman talk about availability and representativeness heuristics:

2.- In the second part they review the frame effect: we are always relative! We cannot be objective! We are always depending on the context we are living!

3.- Third part is devoted to negotiation, and also a part on cognitive disonance, the famous concept by Leon Festinger:

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