Two Pairs of Conflicting Motives in Decision Making

A concept is proposed that decision making consists of resolving two conflicts. One of them is between the desire to make an accurate decision and the desire to minimize the effort of making a choice. The second conflict is between the desire to make an accurate decision and the desire that this decision is distinct. To operationalize basic motives involved in decision making, as assumed in the model, a new process tracing technique has been developed. Using this technique, three experiments were performed to test the predictions of the model. The experiments supported the predictions concerning the conflict between accuracy and distinctness. Similarity of choice alternative and decision importance appeared to affect the way the conflict between accuracy and distinctiveness is solved. An alternative explanation of the results obtained and perspectives of further research are discussed.     

Parent–Child Roles in Decision Making About Medical Research

Our objective is to understand how parents and children perceive their roles in decision making about research participation. Forty-five children (ages 4–15 years) with or without a chronic condition and 21 parents were the participants. A semistructured interview assessed perceptions of up to 4 hypothetical research scenarios with varying levels of risk, benefit, and complexity. Children were also administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition, to assess verbal ability, as a proxy for the child's cognitive development. The audiotaped interviews were transcribed and analyzed for themes related to parent and child decision-making roles. Both parents and children varied in their perceptions of decision-making roles. Child perceptions of parental influence on decision making as knowledge-based increased with cognitive development, whereas perceptions of parental influence as power-based decreased. Both children and parents commented that they would collaborate with each other when making decisions. Collaborative decision making appeared to increase with cognitive development. These findings suggest that approaches to child assent and parent permission should consider the parent–child relationship and how children and families typically make decisions. Future research is necessary to explain variation in the process of research decision making across children and families, explore the role of collaboration on children's decision-making skills, and understand developmental trajectories and mechanisms related to research decision making.     

Teaching Ethical Decision Making: Helping Students Reconcile Personal and Professional Values

Because conflicts between personal and professional values can interfere with ethical decision making, a goal of counselor education must be helping students reconcile such conflicts. This article describes one counselor educator's experience teaching ethical decision making and the effects on student learning. Growth was observed in increased tolerance for ambiguity, awareness of how values influenced decision making, use of multiple factors in decision making, and emphasis on the welfare of clients. Implications for teaching and future research directions are discussed.     

动态系统累积变量判断中的关联启发式

关联启发式是指在累积变量判断中, 将存量与流量建立正相关关系, 认为存量变化特征与流量变化特征具有相似性而导致判断偏差的思维模式。在多特征交互及简单动态系统任务判断中, 关联启发式偏差以不同形式的S-F错误表现出来。作为一种内生性的、顽固的思维模式, 对于关联启发式的心理机制提出了客体偏差、特征替代、不充分调整等多种观点解释。影响关联启发式的个体因素和情境因素的研究结果不尽一致。由于关联启发式偏差直接影响人对复杂系统的可持续性决策和行动, 减少偏差策略的研究也已实现起步。本文系统总结和分析了关联启发式研究的发展脉络, 针对澄清关联启发式的发生机制、系统考察关联启发式的影响因素及其相互作用、丰富和深化关联启发式的研究范式、开发减少关联启发式的有效途径等方面, 提出了深化研究的方向和思路。     

Ethical decision making in family therapy

In family therapy, effective clinical decisions promote the welfare and interests of the family and its individual members. However, the needs of the family and its individual members are often in conflict. Resolving this conflict is an ethical as well as a therapeutic dilemma. Kitchener has developed a model of ethical decision making that we have found useful in teaching students and supervisees how to resolve conflicts between the family's needs and the needs of its members. The purpose of this article is to discuss this model and show how it can be applied to clinical decision making.     

Price-directive decision making in hierarchical systems with conflicting preferences

In this paper we consider a classical model of price-directive decision making in hierarchical organizations, namely Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition, well known from single-objective programming. Here, however, we allow for preference differences that are usually observed between a central unit and a subunit in an organizational structure. The procedure models, therefore, how decision making may evolve in a context with decentralized information as well as intra- and interpersonal conflicts. Several numerical experiments with the procedure have been performed. The results of those experiments demonstrate that the procedure in many instances converges towards an efficient solution, despite the differences in the criteria weights used in the master problem and the subproblem respectively. This suggests that some amount of goal discordance need not prohibit efficient decision making in a hierarchical organization.     

Enhancing Skills for Everyday Problem Solving,Decision Making,and Conflict Resolution in Special Needs Students with the Support of Computer-Based Technology

Too many special needs students leave school without being able to compete effectively for jobs which require problem solving, skilled literacy, knowledge of technology, and at least adequate interpersonal skills. In this article, key problem solving and decision making skills in which special needs students are deficientare outlined and evidence is presented for the importance of teaching these skills. A specific procedure called the Personal Problem Solving Guide, utilizing readily available personal computer technology to teach children social decision making and problem solving, is described. The Guide provides formats that allow for constructive behavior in discipline situations, as well as anticipatory guidance for managing conflicts, thinking about health choices, and reviewing everyday interpersonal and academic situations before taking impulsive action. A case illustration and related information are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of using the computer as a tool for oromoting effective learning of social decision making skills and for bromotinlg the behavioral application of these skills among special needs populations.     

The adult-child relationship in breastfeeding and development: a Merleau-Pontian perspective on the existential and social conflicts in childrearing

This paper discusses Merleau-Ponty’s use of idea of ambivalence and its role in psychological conflicts. Merleau-Ponty affirms ambivalent conflicts as lived and social rather than biologically determined, as one might have in some developmental accounts, or hidden, as in some psychoanalytic accounts. With this concept, the paper takes up feminist considerations of the conflicts experienced by mothers in breastfeeding. It argues that the Merleau-Pontian and feminist approach to considering breastfeeding provides a nuanced model for thinking about development that is better suited to cases where both the child and the parent are co-evolving.     

Diplomacy and Psychology: Psychological Contributions to International Negotiations,Conflict Prevention,and World Peace

Psychological science has the potential to contribute to international diplomacy, and thereby indirectly to the prevention of conflicts between and within states that may escalate to wars. In this introduction of the Special Issue on Diplomacy and Psychology, different varieties of diplomacy are first briefly introduced. Then follows an enumeration of areas of psychological research that show the greatest promise of being directly or indirectly relevant to diplomacy. These research areas include judgement and decision making in negotiations and social dilemmas, social justice, intergroup conflicts, and intercultural processes. An additional area is research on environmental policy making, whose important role needs to be better recognized in international diplomacy. Overviews are also given of the articles included in the Special Issue.     

Chaos and Decision Making: Contextual Disorder Reduces Confirmatory Information Processing

When making decisions, individuals tend to systematically prefer information that supports their a priori views over information that conflicts with them. This phenomenon is known as confirmatory information processing. The present research investigated whether contextual disorder—a factor that is typically irrelevant to a given decision case yet can significantly influence decision quality—affects confirmatory information processing. In Study 1, decision makers in untidy environments evinced less confirmatory information processing than decision makers in tidy environments. Study 2 replicated this finding and demonstrated that divergent thinking is an important precondition of the relationship between disorder and confirmatory information processing.     

Conflict monitoring and decision making: Reconciling two perspectives on anterior cingulate function

According to one influential account, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) serves to monitor for conflicts in information processing. According to another influential account, the ACC monitors action outcomes and guides decision making. Both of these perspectives are supported by an abundance of data, making it untenable to reject one view in favor of the other. Instead, the apparent challenge is to discover how the two perspectives might fit together within a larger account. In the present article, we consider the prospects for such a reconciliation. Juxtaposing the conflict-monitoring and decision-making accounts suggests an extension of the conflict-monitoring theory, by which conflict would act as a teaching signal driving a form of avoidance learning. The effect of this mechanism would be to bias behavioral decision making toward cognitively efficient tasks and strategies. We discuss evidence favoring this proposal and present an initial computational model, which lays the foundation for further development.     

Value conflict and post-decision consolidation

The primary goal of the present study was to investigate how the mental representations of value conflicts are restructured after a decision. A value conflict exists if a chosen alternative is less attractive than a non-chosen alternative on one important attribute when a decision is made. In order to follow up earlier field studies with no experimental control over value conflicts, the present study induced value conflicts in the laboratory. This was done through associating the more attractive of two alternatives with a smaller probability of success. The first hypothesis was that consolidation of value conflict attributes should follow the same pattern when the conflict is controlled experimentally as in earlier studies of real-life decisions. The second hypothesis was that consolidation should be weaker in a non-consequential laboratory study than in the earlier real-life studies. The third hypothesis was that stronger value conflicts (that is, value conflict on more important attributes) lead to greater consolidation effects than weaker value conflicts. The results showed that participants consolidated the value conflicts in the same way as in real-life decisions with the difference that also less important attributes were consolidated in the present study. However, the consolidation effects were not so strong that they caused advantage reversals on a conflict attribute, as in the earlier field studies with real outcomes and consequences. There was no relationship between strength of conflict and consolidation. The fact that no advantage reversals were registered leads to questions about the ecological validity of laboratory studies of non-consequential decision making.     

Probabilistic Inferences Under Emotional Stress: How Arousal Affects Decision Processes

Many models of decision making neglect emotional states that could affect individuals' cognitive processes. The present work explores the effect of emotional stress on people's cognitive processes when making probabilistic inferences. Two contrasting hypotheses are tested against one another: the uncertainty‐reduction and attention‐narrowing hypotheses of how emotional stress affects decision making. In the experimental study, emotional stress was induced through the use of highly aversive pictures immediately before each decision. Emotional state was assessed by both subjective (state anxiety, arousal, and pleasantness ratings) and objective (skin conductance) measures. The results show that emotional stress impacts decision making; in particular, emotionally aroused participants seem to have focused on the most important information and selected simpler decision strategies relative to participants in a control condition. The results are in line with the attention‐narrowing hypothesis and suggest that emotional stress can impact decision making through limited predecisional information search and the selection of simpler decision strategies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of memory for prior instances on performance in a conflict detection task

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of memory for prior instances for making relative judgments in conflict detection. Participants saw pairs of aircraft either repeatedly conflict with each other or pass safely before being tested on new aircraft pairs, which varied in similarity to the training pairs. Performance was influenced by the similarity between aircraft pairs. Detection time was faster when a conflict pair resembled a pair that had repeatedly conflicted. Detection time was slower, and participants missed conflicts, when a conflict pair resembled a pair that had repeatedly passed safely. The findings identify aircraft features that are used as inputs into the memory decision process and provide an indication of the processes involved in the use of memory for prior instances to make relative judgments.     

Multicultural Counseling and Intrapersonal Value Conflict: A Case Study

The internal conflict between professional and personal values that counselors can experience when working with clients whose culture and values are different from their own is discussed. This is not a conflict between the counselor and the client, but is a conflict experienced within the counselor who is attempting to help resolve problems within the client's frame of reference, or worldview. A case study is presented that illustrates the senior author's experience in coping with a specific value conflict. It is suggested that as counselors become more proficient in multicultural counseling and more able to promote decision making from another's point of view, feelings of internal conflicts will decrease. Means of decreasing the likelihood of value conflicts are offered.     

一种新决策模型——量子决策模型

近10年以来, 一些学者基于量子理论研究思想与方法探索出了量子决策模型。由于该模型独特的理论结构, 它可被用于解释传统决策理论所难以解释的问题, 尤其是个体在不确定情况下的决策行为。该模型解释了诸如分离效应、分类决策的干涉效应以及合取谬误等传统决策模型很难解释的问题, 研究者已经证实其中一种称为量子问题等式的决策模型可以精确地预测决策中的顺序效应。作为一个有助于分析心理学中决策现象的新研究领域, 量子决策模型具有深入研究的理论意义和实践意义。     

双向背景信息外部锚问题决策的眼动特征

采用正反双向背景信息日常生活外部锚问题,选取64名大学生,运用眼动技术,考察锚值及双向信息对外部锚问题决策的影响。结果发现：高、低锚组锚定效应指数均在0.76以上,且不存在显著差异。回答锚值比较问题时,从锚值向反向信息的眼跳次数和注视时间显著多于向正向信息的眼跳次数和注视时间。回答估计值问题时,从估计值问题向锚值的眼跳次数和注视时间显著多于向双向信息的眼跳次数和注视时间。研究表明,外部锚引起程度较高的锚定效应。反向信息在问题理解及决策中得到更多关注。锚值在回答锚值比较及估计值问题阶段均对决策产生显著影响。支持了选择通达和信息加工负性偏向观点。     

Bailing and jailing the fast and frugal way

Legal decisions such as the decision to bail upon adjourning a case have major consequences for both defendants and society. In the English system, magistrates, most of whom are lay people, are afforded considerable discretion and must work under constraints such as time pressure. Judgment analysis of the bail decision making policies of 81 magistrates from 44 courts throughout England and Wales revealed intra‐ and inter‐magistrate inconsistency in bail decisions, discrepancies between stated and elicited cue use, and high levels of post‐decisional confidence. Furthermore, magistrates' policies were better described and predicted by a fast and frugal model characterized by noncompensatory cue use, than by either of two compensatory integration models. The fast and frugal model portrays a picture of bail decision making that conflicts with the ideal practice as defined by the due process model of justice. We discuss the implications of these findings for judgment and decision making research and criminal justice policy. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

That Many of Us Should Not Parent

In liberal societies (where birth control is generally accepted and available), many people decide whether or not they wish to become parents. One key question in making this decision is, What kind of parent will I be? Parenting competence can be ranked from excellent to competent to poor. Cassidy argues that those who can foresee being poor parents, or even merely competent ones, should opt not to parent.