In an applied Cognitive Psychology module concerned with Judgement processes such as the one for which this blog is devised and undertaken, it seems almost natural to talk about those who judge by profession, i.e. court judges. Drawing upon a research article by Dahmi (2003) that explored the processes of decisions taken by professional judges in courts, I have had to participate in devising a small presentation on the role of heuristics in such contexts.
In contrast to legal theory, which in a somewhat commonsensical way, assumes that judges evaluate all information that is available to them in order to arrive to a decision, cognitive psychological research such as the paper mentioned above has claimed that people use heuristic strategies that depart from weighing and combining all available information appropriately. Such a claim was based on Dahmi’s (2003) study that tested the ability of two decision making models to predict bail decisions in courts. On one hand, heuristic strategies search only a part of all available cues and even base a decision on one single cue. For instance the matching heuristic (Dhami & Ayton, 2001) was tested in the aforementioned research as a predictor of judges decisions are taken in a non-compensatory way (i.e. without ‘weighing’ or judging the importance of all pieces of information available). It attracts attention to information that is pre-consciously selected as relevant (Evans, 1998) as follows: If the first cue that is encountered gives a reason for a punitive decision then such a decision will be predicted, while if the first cue doesn’t give a reason for being punitive the second one will be examined. If the second cue gives a reason for a punitive decision then such a decision can be predicted, if not a non-punitive decision will be reached (it should be noted that a subset can encompass more than two cues). For instance, in the court study prosecution requests and previous convictions where two cues that were used in such a way. In contrast, historically it has been proposed that linear regression models are used to reach judgements. That is, all available pieces of information are searched, differentially weighed and combined to reach a decision (Dahmi, 2003). Such a process is described by Franklin’s rule (Dahmi, 2003). When Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA, had an important decision to make, he would examine the situation and make a list of all the factors favouring each of his possible options (i.e. pros and cons). Then based on all the information on his list, he would make his decision. In a computational model, such a principle would mean that a weighting function would be applied to all cues available and therefore a decision would be reached in a due process, slowly and statically. Psychological research such as the study described here, has indicated that judges bail or non-bail decision processes are ‘fast and frugal’ (Dahmi, 2003). Judgements are better predicted by a simple matching heuristic, than a process integrating all available information, and might even be based on a single cue!
At first, such findings contradict legal theory and perhaps public perception of justice, That is, people tend to think that a judge would examine all available information carefully to arrive to a decision that might have a dramatic impact on someone’s life. Yet what is demonstrated by cognitive psychology here is that out perceptions of justice may be unrealistic. At some level there is something horrific about this. The almost un-thoughtful rapidity and perhaps ‘close-minded’ equations of different (but similar) cases make me wonder how many court rulings have been as ‘fast and frugal’ as implied here as opposed to the analytical, thoughtful and carefully weighed decisions put forward by the legal discourse.
It was suggested in class that such findings highlight the need for cognitive training of judges in order to help them consciously use more of the information available. Suggestions even went as far as to suggest that a computational equation derived by simple heuristics would actually be well suited to ‘decide and judge’ rather than people doing so. Nevertheless I am still grappling with the idea that decision making is in fact ‘fast and frugal’, especially in courts or similar contexts. Firstly, it seems a bit dubious to generalise such findings and prescribe simple heuristics as ‘explanations’ of human judgement. If anything, such heuristics simply describe processes but don’t explain much about them. Still, just because a descriptive model is a better predictor of final decisions, doesn’t necessarily mean that decisions were actually reached the way the model prescribes. Moreover, assuming that shorter decision times mean less information examined ignores emotional influences and individual differences of those who decide and different characteristicsbetween cases to decide upon..
Being the liberal that I am, I find the idea of reducing human judgement to a computational equation sinister. Such an approach seems valid as a description (if we accept the inherent assumptions that it entails) but has little or no prescriptive validity. The idea that a computational heuristic can simulate human judgement seems constructed and arbitrary as it ignores the phenomenological characteristics of human judgement. That is, it attempts to study the content of though than the actual experience of thinking and deciding and by doing so it ignores consciousness. Why wouldn’t a cognitive psychologist enquire into the phenomena of consciousness by asking people (judges in particular) how they arrived at a particular judgement? How can one assume that this is irrelevant? How can one assume that all cases are treated the same way and that qualitative characteristics of those cases are dismissed or that the emotional influences that such cases or particular characteristics of those cases induce don’t come to play? Why is there a problem with each case being treated as an exception?
It is ironic that cognitive psychology has left experiential and subjective aspects of experience behind and it has attempted to reduce thinking and deciding to an information processing mechanism, leaving the role of feelings, affective and non-affective or sensory, aside (Clore, 1992). From the spreading activation model of memory (Collins & Loftus, 1975) to the ‘revolutionary’ insights to perception, that might actually be more relevant to ophthalmology and not psychology (Klein, 1989) subjective experience, emotion (as such), and individuality have been overlooked.
Yet I feel it is important here to position myself in relation to the concepts discussed here and my own feelings about these concepts described above. As a very liberal individual, I often think of science as socially constructed. I have often questioned the so called scientific methodology and the essentialist assumptions that it entails and I have advocated qualitative research in psychology as an alternative to the prevailing quantitative methods employed. Cognitive psychology has always seemed dubious to me, throughout this degree course as it seems to ignore the very notion that gave birth to it: cognitivism. Dhami’s (2003) study is, to me, another example of how the discipline has been reduced to the study of information processing and I can’t help but wonder: Do we need more ‘quality’ in cognitive psychology? Do we need to revisit the concept of ‘cognitivism’ that once gave rise to this discipline as alternative?
References
Clore, G. (1992). Cognitive Phenomenology: Feelings and the Construction of Judgement. In L. L. Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.). The construction of Social Judgement (pp. 133-163). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Collins, Allan M.; Loftus, Elizabeth F., "A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing", Psychological Review, 82, 407-428.
Dhami, M. K. (2003). Psychological models of professional decision-making. Psychological Science, 14, 175-180.
Dhami, M. K., & Ayton, P. (2001). Bailing and jailing the fast and frugal way. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 14,141-168.
Evans, J. (1998). Matching Bias in Conditional reasoning. Do we understand it after 25 years? Thinking and Reasoning, 4, 45 – 110.
Kein, P. (1989). Psychology Exposed or The Emperor’s New Clothes. New York: Routledge.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi - your post raises more issues than I really have time to address here (regrettably). You are really raising questions about the validity of an entire approach to psychology.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to the specific studies carried out by Mandeep Dhami, she's certainly not claiming that all legal decision making is made according to fast and frugal heuristics. Her work specifically focused on magistrates who are seeing a "conveyor belt" of defendants who will be tried at a later date, but who - in the meantime - must either be bailed or jailed pending that later trial.
She did actually report that some judges appeared to be using more than one cue, but they were in a minority.
In relation to your point about asking people about their behaviour, there's nothing wrong with that and it can be used to guide further research; but as I noted in class, what people say is not always an accurate account of their own behaviour. Nor are such experiential accounts necessarily useful in terms of diagnosis or prediction. For example, when eyewitnesses express high confidence in their judgments this is sadly unpredictive of how accurate they actually are.
I think your suggestion that cognitive psychology has left experiential and subjective aspects of behaviour behind is not actually true at all. In fact, much of the relevant work is going on in this specific domain of judgment & decision making. For instance, there has been a great deal of research into emotion, particularly over the last 15 years or so... to pick just one example, researchers have looked at individual differences in the emotional reactions to 9/11 and how this relates to their opinions as to what an appropriate response should be. In fact, quite a bit of research has suggested that cognitions are often primarily determined by emotional reactions. JDM researchers have also been at the forefront of the recent interest in happiness and wellbeing. But again, much of this research shows that people fail to understand what has or will make them happy (or unhappy, come to that).
However, within this specific field of judgment & decision making, researchers are concerned both with describing the processes underlying judgments and decisions but also with the issues of accurate/good judgments and decisions. So, not only can a fast-and-frugal model claim to describe a process of judgment, but it can be used to make predictions. Now, regardless of whether people are or are not actually adopting fast and frugal heuristics, the fact is that - under certain conditions - high levels of judgmental accuracy can be achieved by applying such heuristics. De facto, that gives them prescriptive validity.
So I would suggest that there is nothing illiberal by developing information-processing models of thought and behaviour - and emotions themselves are a form of information. The point is, surely, what works and what doesn't. Time and again, research has shown that diagnoses and predictions based on equations are more accurate than the human judges (from whom those equations are often derived), even though those judges may have had access to extra information, such as responses from an interviewee who is the subject of the judgment.