For most problems encountered in daily live, certain methods to come to a solution exist. As inspired by the natural sciences, we tend to think that using this methods can give us access to the best and proper solution; a solution which adheres to an objective truth. In science , for example, before making a claim a scientist is expected to do proper research before committing him or herself to this claim. He or she is expected to gather trustful resources, and reference them so that others could look up these sources themselves.
Utilizing certain methods of grounding your decision or judgement. are meant to shield us against wrong judgements and biases. The common practice of adhering to certain methods, is what is in general considered as acting rational.
Although the general idea that everyone is rational to a great extend, research in the field of psychology and behavioral economics have shown that this is not the case. As early in 1947 Herbert A. Simon, a cognitive psychologist, suggested that human judgements were mostly grounded by heuristics which weren't rational by nature. Heuristics can be understood as 'experience-based techniques' for problem solving which do not necessarily lead to the optimal solution for a problem. In the beginning of the 1970s two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, demonstrated three of these hereustics as underlying most of our intiutive decisionmaking. For example, when asked how high people regard the chance of them of being in a dramatic accident in the future, most of them will overestimate this chance. This is due to the fact that these events are highly publicised, making them readily available to base a decision or estimate on. This is what Tversky & Kahneman call the Availability heuristic. This heuristic implies that most people base their decision on readily available (and often incomplete) information, without questioning the information or relativating the information in a bigger context. This research marked the beginning of a whole new field of research that challenged the idea of the idea of human beings as being rational.
Why is this interesting for our topic 'Solution'? Most of the time we regard problems as having a solution , which we have an immediate access to; it is only a matter of utilizing the right methods to get to the solution. However, this research suggest that, more often than not, we are led astray by cognitive biases which actually hinders us from finding the right solution. This conflict between cognitive biases and rationality in problem-solving could be an interesting area for our research.
A link to the paper of Tversky and Kahneman:
http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf
Very nice summary. As you may know Kahneman has a recent book out on this topic, Thinking Fast and Slow, but the above indeed is *the* classical paper that more or less started it. Another popular recent author (but not as deep perhaps) is Dan Ariely with books like Predictably Irrational. This also blends into areas such as persuasive technologies. Or related concepts such as the spectrum from rationality to bounded rationality to more heuristics and biases of these.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a little bit out of the topic, but I was thinking about the influence of media; if people overestimate the chance of having an accident due to the high frequency of reports in medias and such...then to what extend are our decisions ours or can we consider us as a part of crowd behavior that can be studied, analyzed and reported to some patterns?
ReplyDeleteA generalization of what Eva says falls within the area of Persuasion. Basically you use some biases of people to persuade them - evil but it works and can also be used for good causes. One of these principles is called 'social proof' - i.e. other people like you also did a, b or c. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion (weapons of influence) or http://captology.stanford.edu/ (BJ Fogg).
ReplyDeleteTo add, in an article that connects heuristics and intuition (Gigerenzer, The intelligence of the unconscious, Winning without thinking) is stated that an intuitive "shortcut" can typically get us where we would like to be, and with a smaller chance of making grave errors. The example of an author is that football players use several rules of thumb to catch a ball. One of them is called gaze heuristic: "Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of gaze remains constant. The angle of gaze is the angle between the eye and the ball, relative to the ground. A player who uses this rule does not need to measure wind, air resistance, spin, or the other causal variables. All the relevant facts are contained in one variable: the angle of gaze." When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again, he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball. He may neither know nor care what a differential equation is, but this does not affect his skill with the ball. At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on. Link: http://www.lse.ac.uk/PublicEvents/pdf/20081020_gerdgigerenzer.pdf
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