Addio, Addio

Endings to me are about reflecting on one’s experience and performance. As the module for which this blog was kept is about to come to an end, here I seek to describe my experience of keeping this blog. At some level this blog has been a great opportunity to engage with the material presented in class, to think about cognitive theories discussed and apply them to my own material and my own views. As keeping a blog in the context of an assessed module, is relatively new I was surprised to find out that it was harder work than I expected it to be. On top of the rest of the coursework and added to a full time study curriculum, there were times when an extra blog seemed able to be that extra ‘bit’ that adds immense pressure, particularly because it was a very novel experience as well. The online nature of it has also been something new and at times I found myself keeping a hard copy reflective blog and transferring my entries online at later dates. This is because noting down my thoughts and ideas immediately after class was often easier to do offline, as getting access to the internet is not always possible after class. Nonetheless, keeping an online blog was new process and putting some technical mishaps aside it has been creative and interesting.

The blog provided opportunity to look into articles and areas of research that I wouldn’t have engaged with, had this module been assessed by exam only, and to develop new interests in the area. Moreover, the relatively ‘casual’ attitude towards the blogs kept here, was also enabling, as reflection is not something that can be done by prescription. That is, had that blog been assessed strictly on the grounds of deadline terms (i.e. strictly a number of posts every week, or every month) it would have ended up being more descriptive rather than reflective as reflection needs time to emerge and it simply can’t be undertaken on demand. From this viewpoint, the experience of a reflective blog has clearly added to my learning experience here.

As a reflective exercise such blogs could strengthen learning and memory of the material presented by allowing the learners to attempt to make their own meaning of it. By examining my beliefs, emotions and behaviour in relation to the theories discussed, not only did I seek more knowledge in particular domains but I am also more confident that I will remember more than I would remember had I just read articles as a study exercise.

Last but not least, I never new how to devise a blog before. Here, I had the opportunity to learn hoe to blog or create wikis and online presentations, something that I won’t forget about even if I forget most of the cognitive theories that we discussed this semester.

How 'free' is free choice?

Last week I had to consult a dentist on toothache, and I was told that I could have a dental filling immediately, in an attempt to save the tooth on the day of the consultation or wait to get free tratement through the health service in a few weeks. I was told that ' in these cases, there is a small chance that the tooth will be saved. It is not granted that a filling will save the tooth'. I had a very expensive filling thinking whether or not I was panicked into getting it there and then. What would have happened if say, the dentist had told me 'in these cases there is a big chance that the tooth will die. It is not granted that a filling will save the tooth'. Would I have had the filling right away, which would mean more cost as it would be private dental treatment? Or I would have waited a couple of weeks to get free treatment? This made me think of how we chose between alternative options in terms of cognitive theories presented in class.

Well, how do we chose between alternatives offered (even implicitely) to us? The following video sheds some light in our sometimes irrational decisions.

The so called 'framing effect' is observed when different options are described in terms of gains (positive frame, i.e. small chance to save the tooth) rather than losses (big chance for tooth to die-negative frame). A classic experimental demonstration of this effect was Kehneman and Tversky's (1981) 'Asian disease problem' in which participants were asked to chose between a certain and a risky option to save lives of reduce deaths from a disease. The problem was posed as follows:

Positive frame:
If Program A is adopted, exactly 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is a 1 in 3 probability that all 600 people will be saved
and a 2 in 3 probability that no people will be saved.
Negative frame:
If Program C is adopted, exactly 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted, there is a 1 in 3 probability that nobody will die and a 2 in 3
probability that all 600 will die. (adapted from Gonzalez, Dana, Koshino & Just, 2004, p.2)

It was found that most people chose A over B and D over C, even though they are contradictory. Indeed, A is equivalent to C and D to B. (Kahneman & Tversky, 1981). But why do people reach such seemingly irrational decisions? In other words, why did I just have an expensive filling on a tooth that is probably gone already?

Research has shown that changes in the ways in which information is presented can have large effects on peoples choices. Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), explains such fraiming effects in terms of losses and gains. An outcome is described (and perceived) either as a gain or a loss relative to a reference point, i.e. the status quo (weighting function). Moreover Prospect theory asserts that people are more sensitive to losses than gains, i.e. a potential loss is more catastrophic than an equal gain would is gratifying. Thus, people tend to avoid risk when a positive frame (gain) is presented (e.g. I ll have dental treatment immediately) and seek risk when a negative frame (loss) is presented (e.g. I will hold off and have dental treatment later). Other studies have shown that people asked to chose between radiation therapy and surgery for cancer prefer the surgery otpion if it is described in terms of entailing possibility to survive cancerrather than possibility to die from the disease ( McNeil, Pauker, Sox, Tversky, 1982).

The fact that people's decisions are affected by the ways in which information is presented raises some interesting and in some cases thorny questions. For instance in the case of medical setings, should doctors try to manipulate patients' attitude towards their own health, eliciting decisions that are more appropriate to particular cases or should information be presented in an objective way (i.e. both positive and negative frames could be presented). Should/could political opinions be framed so that voters vote for certain alternatives? How far reaching are framing effects in financial settings and how can they affect borrowing, lending or investing? Choosing appropriate frames, moves from psychology to ethics, and it seems that such issues need to be addressed both as scientific but also as ethical and philosophical.

Gonzales, C., Dana, J., Koshino, H., Just, M. (2004). The framing effects and risky decisions: Examining cognitive functions with fMRI. Journal of Economic Psychology, 26 (2005) 1–20

Kahneman,D.,& Tversky,A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2),263–291.

McNeil BJ, Pauker SG, Sox HC, Tversky A. (1982). On the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. New England Journal of Medicine, 306: 1259–62.

Tversky,A., & Kahneman,D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453–458.

Overconfidence: just an illusory trip to lake Wobegon?

Some people seem to be overconfident about their performence and ability even when the whole world might have a very different opinion.

In his novel, Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor describes a small town in rural US where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" (Keillor, 1985). Such a characterization demonstrates par excellence the pervasive human tendency to overestimate one’s performance, ability and achievements in relation to others. The Lake Wobegon Effect as it has been referred to, causes people to think that they are ‘above average’ in many domains in life and has been observed in different situations such as academic performance, intelligence, social skills, and skill specific capabilities (Hoorens, 1993).

Kruger and Dunning (1999), devised experiments in which participants were given specific tasks (such as judging humorous jokes as funny or not, grammar tasks and logic problems) and were asked to evaluate their perceived performance on these tasks relative to the rest of the group they had been put in. Actual and perceived performance were compared and it was found that in all groups participants evaluated their performance as above average. Even those whose actual performance was at the lowest levels tended to grossly overestimate their ability. In the Nobel (2000) winning paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), which was presented by myself and others colleagues in class today, the authors attribute the illusory superiority effects to lack of task specific knowledge. That is, a remarkable link seems to exist between overconfidence and incompetence: people with little knowledge about something tend not to recognise their own lack of knowledge and fail to see expertise in others. Indeed, as the research mentioned above indicated, not only do incompetent individuals fail to recognise expertise and competence and overestimate their ability but are also oblivious to social comparison information, i.e. they can’t use other people’s better/worse performance as information to evaluate their own performance. Intuitively, this argument seems very plausible. If one lacks the knowledge about a specific task/domain/situation how can one spot out his/her own mistakes? For instance, when I took a module in French, while studying for my BSc, I had to write short letters to demonstrate my knowledge of basic French, as part of the assessment. In those letters, that now seem very amusing, I was oblivious to all basic rules or French grammar and syntax, writing sentences that would be the equivalent of “Me go university very nice”. While writing such sentences I thought they were actually correct (until the results were given out). As the knowledge needed to write good French is the same knowledge needed to spot out mistakes in these writings, and as I lacked such knowledge at that stage, I thought I wrote correctly. Therefore, being overconfident about my ability to write good French was a result of my lack of grammatical and syntactic knowledge.

The fact that we favorably compare ourselves to others, as demonstrated by research, makes me think whether appart from knowledge levels, individual differences are into play in illusory superiority effects as well. Do people that score higher in self esteem overestimate their performance and rate themselves above others (as a result of their higher optimism and self esteem) or do those with lower self esteem belittle others (and as a result, seemingly overestimate themselves) in order to strengthen their fragile self concept, as perhaps a psychotherapist would assert?
Nonetheless, regardless of my own levels of self esteem (that oscillate between inexistence and oblivion) I wonder how much I actually knew about a particular domain, when I judged myself to be ‘better than average’ in it. Hmm…



Hoorens, Vera (1993). Self-enhancement and Superiority Biases in Social Comparison. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, (1): 113–139.

Keillor, G. (1985). Lake Wobegon Days. New York: Viking.

Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, (6): 1121–34.

My uncle's taxi: irrational decision making?

When I was growing up, my uncle, who was a taxi driver used to take me for a ride on his taxi. He would drive around the city, while I would sleep on the back seat for most of the time. On busy days, when he made more profit quickly we would end up on the beach eating ice-cream. If he kept counting the income he had gained, I knew it would be a long day in the taxi while if he smiled and yawned along the way I knew that he was close to making his daily target, which of course meant, ice cream. Given my uncle’s massive amounts of debt (to which I was oblivious back then) I wonder why he’d rather have ice cream with a 10 year old than work more to make more money. Indeed one would expect that my uncle would work more hours on a busy day when his wage rate was higher. I don’t know if he regrets such working patterns now that he is retired but as we had the opportunity to find out in the context of this module, research shows that my uncle was not the only ‘lazy’ taxi driver. Indeed many New York taxi drivers finish work when they reach a target that has been pre-set. That is, they typically work fewer hours on busy days than on slower days, as on busy days they reach the income target faster (Hardman, 2009).

Nonetheless, such a working pattern seems somewhat irrational. Indeed rational labour-market theory proposes that those taxi drivers would work longer hours on busy days, when their hourly wage-rate is higher. Nonetheless such a seemingly irrational behaviour has been explained in terms of prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), which describes how people make decisions between alternatives that involve risk by evaluating potential losses and gains. Prospect theory that claims that people are generally ‘loss averse’ i.e. they get less utility for say gaining £1000 than they would lose if they lost the same amount. People set a reference point and evaluate outcomes as gains or losses relative to that point. This idea can explain the working patterns of taxi drivers described above: achieving the set daily target (reference point) is seen as a win minimising incentive to keep working. On the other hand, failing to achieve the daily income target is seen as loss, and the loss aversion tendency makes taxi drivers work longer to avoid loss altogether.
I can’t help but think that for my uncle who is still swimming in debt, trying not to drown, this will be great news. After all, he was not the only one...

Hardman, D (2009). Judgement and Decision Making: Psychological perspectives. Chichester: Backwell.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47 , 263-291.

Luna

Aspects of endowment or the double standards of selling and buying precious stones...

Back in the good times of being better off financially, I used to deal gem stones mainly because I’ve always had a passion for jewellery which led me to study jewellery design in the past. I remember always grappling with the high prices I had to pay for precious and semi-precious stones and also the prices I would get for my designs that I perceived to be lower than the value that I had judged for my own designs. Even though the stones I bought and sold were certifies as equal according to the international grading standards, I often thought that the ones I had had more attractive colours, or more clarity or just looked ‘more polished’. At least they looked more polished to me therefore I estimated a higher value for them than other stones that I would buy that were of the same quality. Not surprisingly, cognitive theorists have picked up on this, and the class discussion on endowment theory came to shatter my illusion that I had the best gemstones ever, that should have sold for a lot more than they were sold for…

Endowment refers exactly to how we judge the monetary value of objects and how such judgement predicts subsequent decisions made. More specifically a value of an item can be judged in two ways: how much we are willing to accept loss of an object for (i.e. to sell the object) and how much we are willing to buy it for. At some level the idea that we value objects that we own more than those that we don’t seems commonsensical perhaps due to emotional influences (we get attached to objects that we own). Research suggests that even when an item has recently come into our possession, we still value it higher as we are averse to the idea of giving things up.
Francis, Haubel & Keinian (2007) have proposed an account of endowment drawing upon memory concepts. This memory based account suggests that while buyers of items produce more value-decreasing aspects (i.e. negative thought about the item), sellers produce more value-increasing aspects (i.e. positive thought about the items). In effect, when I was selling diamonds I might have been producing more positive thought about the diamonds that I sold, arriving at higher valuations while following the opposite procedure when buying diamonds.

Such endowment effects readily branch out to many real life situations. For instance in the current recession climate, a house seller might be unwilling to accept a lower price, even though the price is still higher than they paid for to buy the house at the first place. In such cases eliminating endowment effects, i.e. by framing losses as potential gains, would overcome such rigidity. Indeed when the market seemed to recover for a while, sellers revaluated such losses as potential gains on the new house they were now (hypothetically) able to buy, hence accepting lower prices.

I wonder how much emotion plays a role in this, and if endowment could be extended to situations that monetary value and emotions are in interplay and situations were ‘on-objects’ are involved. As a person who is probably obsessed with English bulldogs, as with many other English concepts, I have been actively involved in breeding and rescuing dogs for the last 3 years seeking to better the breed standards. When I deal dogs both in the UK and abroad I often think that the ones that I have bred are in many aspects better than the ones that I buy off other breeders. I am not suggesting that bulldogs are in any way object-like but I found the discussion on endowment very interesting as it made me think that there is a difference in valuing my own dogs and those I buy from others. For instance I always ask for higher prices for my dogs sold to kennels abroad than the ones I buy with very similar pedigrees and bloodlines. I thought that mine always just ‘looked cuter’ and were in some mysterious way an improvement to the breed standard. To have endowment theory elucidate such cognitive patterns is very interesting. Nevertheless, the possibility that such thought are exactly that, patterns, that can be sussed out in relation to whether one in a buyer of a seller, doesn’t make my very special bulldog, Luna (pictured here) any less special!!

References

Johnson, E.J., Haubl, G. & Keinan, A. (2007) Aspects of Endowment: A query Theory of Value Construction. Journal Of Experimental Psychology, 33(3), pp.461-474.

Hmm... fast and frugal 'reflection' ?

In reply to David Hardman's comment on my thoughts about the heuristics and biases paradigm and the current approach to the whole of psychology, I went back and read Dhami's (2003) write up of the bail decision study, trying to keep a more objective stance. It seems that I had made some unfounded assumptions at the first place, which warrant further attention to my own reflective processes (more on this later). To begin with I failed to see Dhami's findings in their particular context. That is, the paper discussed bail decision and not jury or juror decision making processes. There is certainly a qualitative difference between a bail or jail decision by a magistrate, pending later trial, and later stage legal decision making. The pescriptive validity of fast and frugal heuristic (at least in the context described in the study discussed here) is evident. Nonetheless, what is the importance of judgemental accuracy of such heuristics if people don't actually use them? There is nothing to suggest that we can be certain that people actually use such heuristics in general or exclusively, and even if they do under certain circumstances (i.e. time constraints) it seemes dubious to generalise.

To stay within the context of decision making in courts, consider the widely popularised R v Maxwell case. In January 1996, Maxwell bros were cleared of all charges to defraud pension funds of £400 million, against the weight of evidence and public opinion. This case is a prime example of a 'perverse acquittal', i.e. a jury decision that goes against public opinion and what the evidence suggests. Surely, jury decision making is a group process and as such different than individual decision making discussed here, but leaving group dynamics or conformity etc, aside, it would be reasonable to suggest that individual jurors 'world knowledge', i.e. their beliefs about 'how things are' may have their role in such cases and some form of cognitive architectural equation would be unlikely to predict the outcome in such cases. Thus, jurors may as well employ heuristics but a judgement may also be influenced by individual differences and by the use of one's own world knowledge. Enquiring into the phenomena of consciousness, by asking people what they think while judging, or, from a more quantitative point of view, measuring attitudes and biases by using scales and questionnaires would also elucidate aspects of judgement other than heuristics.

Therefore one's world knowledge may affect one's decision/behaviour/judgement, and particularly on my own world knowledge, this is exactly what happened when I wrote the previous post. That is, the way I see the world, and thus the way I see psychology, cognitive psychology and research methodology caused me to adopt a somewhat close-minded attitude, when reading about the role of heuristics in human judgement. On second thought, heuristics seem to be part of the picture and as such give a better insight to phenomena of decision making (even though I still don't see how a mathematical equation could address the complexity of judgement and not miss exceptional cases and more subjective aspects). It is important not to see things as mutually exclusive and to return to my previous post, both quantitative and qualitative methodologies seem to have their own strengths and limitations but could perhaps be used to describe different aspects of reasoning.


Dhami, M. K. (2003). Psychological models of professional decision-making. Psychological Science, 14, 175-180.