Functional versus dysfunctional team change: Problem diagnosis and structural feedback for self-managed teams

We describe and examine three changes (personnel, process, and structure) that self-managed teams can make to remedy performance problems. We also discuss why self-managed teams may over-emphasize process and (to a lesser extent) personnel changes over structural changes. Furthermore, we describe and test two specific diagnostic feedback interventions aimed at helping teams make functional structural change. Seventy-eight 4-person teams of undergraduate students participated in two trials of a networked laboratory simulation task. All teams were initially structurally misaligned and subsequently received (a) no feedback, (b) one type of feedback only, or (c) both types of feedback. Results confirmed that structurally misaligned teams demonstrated dysfunctional change by changing process more frequently than structure, with detrimental effects for subsequent performance. When teams received the feedback interventions, however, they were more likely to change their structure and thereby improve their performance.     

Goal‐Proximity Decision‐Making

Reinforcement learning (RL) models of decision‐making cannot account for human decisions in the absence of prior reward or punishment. We propose a mechanism for choosing among available options based on goal‐option association strengths, where association strengths between objects represent previously experienced object proximity. The proposed mechanism, Goal‐Proximity Decision‐making (GPD), is implemented within the ACT‐R cognitive framework. GPD is found to be more efficient than RL in three maze‐navigation simulations. GPD advantages over RL seem to grow as task difficulty is increased. An experiment is presented where participants are asked to make choices in the absence of prior reward. GPD captures human performance in this experiment better than RL.     

Enhanced Cardiac Perception Is Associated With Increased Susceptibility to Framing Effects

Previous studies suggest in line with dual process models that interoceptive skills affect controlled decisions via automatic or implicit processing. The “framing effect” is considered to capture implicit effects of task‐irrelevant emotional stimuli on decision‐making. We hypothesized that cardiac awareness, as a measure of interoceptive skills, is positively associated with susceptibility to the framing effect. Forty volunteers performed a risky‐choice framing task in which the effect of loss versus gain frames on decisions based on identical information was assessed. The results show a positive association between cardiac awareness and the framing effect, accounting for 24% of the variance in the framing effect. These findings demonstrate that good interoceptive skills are linked to poorer performance in risky choices based on ambivalent information when implicit bias is induced by task‐irrelevant emotional information. These findings support a dual process perspective on decision‐making and suggest that interoceptive skills mediate effects of implicit bias on decisions.     

Decision Making with Uncertain Reinforcement in Children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Reward-related processes are impaired in children with ADHD. Whether these deficits can be ascribed to an aversion to delay or to an altered responsiveness to magnitude, frequency, valence, or the probability of rewards still needs to be explored. In the present study, children with ADHD and normal controls aged 7 to 10 years performed a simple probabilistic discounting task. They had to choose between alternatives where the magnitude of rewards was inversely related to the probability of outcomes. As a result, children with ADHD opted more frequently for less likely but larger rewards than normal controls. Shifts of the response category after positive or negative feedback, however, occurred as often in children with ADHD as in control children. In children with ADHD, the frequency of risky choices was correlated with neuropsychological measures of response time variability but unrelated to measures of inhibitory control. It is concluded that the tendency to select less likely but larger rewards possibly represents a separate facet of dysfunctional reward processing, independent of delay aversion or altered responsiveness to feedback.     

Developmental changes of win-stay and loss-shift strategies in decision making

This study aims to clarify the developmental changes in real-life decision making when strategy is adjusted using both positive and negative feedback, that is, whether strategic adjustment evolves with age. A total of 84 participants divided into three age groups (children, adolescents, and adults) performed the standard version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Children and adolescents showed a strong bias in favor of disadvantageous choices whereas adults learned to decide advantageously during the course of the task. Interestingly, the results clearly demonstrate that children did not switch differently following gains and losses whereas adolescents and adults switched more often after a loss than after a gain, corresponding to the “loss-shift” and the “win-stay” strategies, respectively. The results also revealed that adults switched less often after losses compared to children and adolescents and, thus, used the loss-stay strategy more often than the 2 youngest groups. These new findings suggest that successful completion of the IGT by adults requires fine feedback monitoring and more frequent use of the win-stay and loss-stay strategic adjustments.     

Preparing young veterans for civilian life: The effects of a workshop on career decision-making difficulties and self-efficacy

The current study mapped the career decision-making difficulties and career decision self-efficacy of 1315 young veterans who participated in a 5-day workshop aimed at facilitating their transition to civilian life. A pre- and post-test comparison showed that participation in the workshop reduced (d = 0.57) the participants' career decision-making difficulties (measured by the CDDQ; Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996) and increased (d = 0.77) their career decision self-efficacy (measured by the CDSE; Taylor & Betz, 1983). A more advanced decision status, as reflected in the participants' Range of Considered Alternatives ( Saka & Gati, 2007), was negatively associated with participants' career decision-making difficulties, and positively associated with career decision self-efficacy. However, a more advanced decision status and the perceived effectiveness of the workshop were not associated with the decrease in difficulties and the increase in self-efficacy that resulted from participating in the workshop. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Feasibility OF Collectives' Actions

Orthodox decision theory gives no advice to agents who hold two goods to be incommensurate in value because such agents will have incomplete preferences. According to standard treatments, rationality requires complete preferences, so such agents are irrational. Experience shows, however, that incomplete preferences are ubiquitous in ordinary life. In this paper, we aim to do two things: (1) show that there is a good case for revising decision theory so as to allow it to apply non-vacuously to agents with incomplete preferences, and (2) to identify one substantive criterion that any such non-standard decision theory must obey. Our criterion, Competitiveness, is a weaker version of a dominance principle. Despite its modesty, Competitiveness is incompatible with prospectism, a recently developed decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences. We spend the final part of the paper showing why Competitiveness should be retained, and prospectism rejected.     

Combining Explicit Timing with an Interdependent Group Contingency Program to Decrease Transition Times

ABSTRACT

A sixth-grade teacher and consultant serving as a behavioral specialist developed, implemented, and evaluated the Timely Transitions Game (TTG), a procedure designed to reduce room-to-room transition times. The TTG combined several procedures that have been shown to alter student behavior including explicit timing procedures and an interdependent, group-oriented reward program with randomly selected criteria. Five transition times were measured and recorded each day. At the end of the school day, the teacher randomly selected a transition and a criterion (seconds taken to transition). If the class completed the randomly selected transition in less time than the randomly selected criterion, they earned a letter. When students earned enough letters (e.g., the five letters that spell M-U-S-I-C), they received access to the reward (e.g., listening to music during independent seat-work). Results indicated immediate and sustained decreases in transition times following the implementation of the intervention. Although methodological concerns prevent drawing cause-and-effect conclusions, the current study shows how educators can adapt and combine empirically validated strategies and procedures to remedy presenting problems.     

Multicriteria Classification with Unknown Categories: A Clustering–Sorting Approach and an Application to Conflict Management

This work proposes an approach to cluster and sort a set of alternatives considering multi‐criteria categories with a partial order structure. It can be considered a heuristic approach because it does not attempt to derive an optimal partial order among all conceivable clusters of alternatives. Rather than this, it intends to be a simple approach that is transparent to the Decision Maker (DM) whose assistance is sought to help shaping the results. The approach proposed arises from the conjugation of traditional Clustering analysis and Multi‐criteria sorting tools. At the outset, the number of categories and their characteristics is unknown. First, we need to detect only the clusters themselves on the basis of a similarity measure independent of the preferences of the DM. Next, we detect potential partial order relations that might exist between them, according to the subjective preferences of the DM. Such preferences are elicited only after the DM has examined the clusters detected and deemed that these categories made sense. The new approach performs very well in a real‐world problem of management of intragroup conflicts and conflict handling strategies. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Directions for judgment and decision making research based on comparison selection: Reply to Arkes,Johnson, and Kardes

Our target article proposed an alternative perspective for studying consumer judgment and decision making, focusing on the types and weights of comparisons consumers select. In this response we consider the major points made by each of the commentators and examine their implications for future work addressing our comparison-focused approach.