The end

Our projects have been handed in, our presentations done and we have come to then end of the judgement and decision making module.

In all i felt it was a really good module in which i learned a lot and the format i enjoyed a lot better than having exams or 100% coursework. It enabled us to work together in teams and interact a lot more than in any other module i have completed.

Hopefully i will do well in my grades as i feel i have put a lot of effort into my work!

The final week!

Our last lecture is on Friday in which we are doing our group presentation!!

It has actually gone really well so far and our topic of jury decision making is very interesting! i have finished writing my slides for the collaborative presentation as have some of the others so we are on track for Friday...

We had our first lecture of presentations last Friday and it was very interesting to see every one else's topics presented to us. They were all good and explained everything well however a few were slightly long and after sitting their for 3 hours watching them i was slightly dazed!

This has given us incentive to make sure we include all the key points surrounding our topic but to make sure that it is short and sweet as to get the information across but not to bore people! Hopefully we will achieve this but its easier said than done!

I have just spent the evening reading, making notes and getting to grips with my article by terry Connolly which i am writing about in the end of semester wiki and am now ready to write it up this week! I was hoping to get it done by Christmas as want to have it all finished by the holidays!

I will let you know how the presentation goes on Friday...

Time to start our final wiki and presentation

We all met up as a group today and David helped us to look at the papers on jury decision making in more depth and helped us to understand the more technical aspects of the papers. We divided the paper which we are doing for our presentation, the one by Dhami on jury decision making beyond reasonable doubt. I was assigned the task of writing a few slides on explaining the aims and methods of both the experiments that were conducted within the paper. We are presenting our slide show in the final week of the term so we have time to get it all together.

Finally for our final wiki we have then divided up the papers into equal amounts for everyone to write about, as it only has to be 2000 words in total it is going to be hard task to condense all the technical details into something like 300 words for each paper. I am writing about an extract by terry Connolly from the textbook judgement and decision making, me and Sarah are sharing this article as it is slightly trickier than the other 2 however since David went through it earlier it is a lot clearer!!

I will let you know how i get on with these task in the next week!

Doing our first Wiki and making a start on our last!

Our first Wiki was due in last week and it was a new experience when writing it!

Firstly we had to sort out amongst our groups through numerous emails who would play what part in the wiki in order for it to be a collaborative effort and everyone have the same amount of work to do! I found it a new task in which i had never used google for anything other than searching the web before!

My part in the wiki was to not read a specific paper but to in general describe framing effects. Within my 500 words i had to do an introduction with a brief description of what framing effects are and how when wording a question in a different way can produce such a significant difference in answers! I then had to wait until the rest of my group had completed and read the papers they were assigned so i could read through them all and tie the project together with a conclusion.

Everything went smoothly until the end of the first week when one person hadn't written their piece as i hadn't checked that day but the deadline had been extended, so unbeknown to this i wrote the conclusion without including the paper that she had written. When the mistake was rectified i then added in a section on the paper she read as it was similar to one of the others it was not too difficult!!

My role in the paper helped me a lot as i got to read everyone's pieces m0re than once to gain an idea of what they were trying to do conduct individual research into framing effects as a whole and by writing the conclusion made sense of it all and tied it up in my mind!!

The whole idea of framing effects i now find very interesting and understand in a much better way than before. I can see myself looking at real life situations in which framing effects are apparent and recognising them.

We have been given our topic for the end of term wiki which is jury decision making!! It was our second choice so we are very happy with it as our whole group are doing the module forensic psychology in which one of the lectures was on jury decision making. It was something that interests us all so i feel this will show in our wiki!

We are all reading the same paper for next week when we are going to meet up in the lecture and sort out our presentation we are doing in the last week.

The Endowment Effect

In preparation for this weeks lecture our group was given the reading by John. A List, 'Neoclassical Theory Vs. Prospect Theory.'

The reading and lecture was based on 'The endowment effect' which can be described as people value a good a lot more once their property right to it has been established. I'm sure a lot of people would agree with this as it seems a reasonable statement, we tend to feel more attached to said good if it is ours rather than a good on a shelf. The paper that we read was focusing on the endowment effect and the way in which both the neoclassical and prospect theory can or can't explain it.

The prospect theory is seen as being a good explanation for the endowment effect as by loosing the item it is weighting more heavily that gaining a new one. However, the endowment effect is inconsistent with economic theories such as the neoclassical theory as according to them, you would weight the price of the item the same for what you would sell it for as for what you would buy it for. So the neoclassical theory cannot explain this effect, whereas in the prospect theory there is weighting around a reference point.

The neoclassical theory's argument for the endowment effect, is that simply inexperienced buyers would experience it, and that it is something that needs to be learned and a mistake made by an inexperienced consumer. The more experience in the market place you have the more likely your behaviour will resemble that of the neoclassical model.

An experiment took place in which there were 4 conditions, you were endowed with either a mug or candy bar, both or neither. There were two groups, non-dealers and dealers. The results showed that the non-dealers, with very little experience in the marketplace once endowed with a candy bar 81% kept it when asked if they would like to trade for a mug. Only 7% wanted to trade. This provides evidence of the endowment effect supported by prospect theory, but also for the idea that with experience it does not effect you. As in the experiment the Dealers were not influenced by the conditions.

I have found the idea of the endowment effect very interesting and easy to get to grips with as i can see how i would be influenced in it within my own decisions. The wiki is due in next week and our group is doing it on decision framing, my part is to generally analyse decision making as a whole and make some concluding remarks!

Decision Framing

In preparation for the lecture this week our group had to read the article by Mandel, 'Gain-loss framing and choice'. Unfortunately i was not present in the lecture as i was ill, however i had completed all the readings and made all the notes so i will let you know what i came to learn about decision framing from this paper.

The paper is mainly based around the idea of the disease problem in which Tversky and Kahneman came up with. Depending on the way in which the question is 'framed' for example based on either 'lives saved' or 'lives at risk' participants are likely to go for two different answers. If the question is based on the number of lives that can be saved and a sure option is available we would naturally be risk adverse and choose that option, as who wants to risk lives when we can at least 100% save say 200? However on the other hand when asked in a different format i.e. 400 will die people are reluctant to go for the sure thing as the question is framed around lives that are at risk. We tend to be a lot more risk seeking if there is a small opportunity that we can save some lives, however improbable that is.

One of the explanations for this brought up in the paper was that when the statement is 200 lives saved. It doesn't clarify the fact that yes 400 people will die. As people can't see the whole picture they are more likely to believe that yes there is a chance that more will be saved and 200 are definitely saved, but 400 aren't definitely going to die. When missing information is then filled in Kuhberger found that no framing effect was found.

This paper was a lot easier to digest than past weeks and i found myself understanding what i was reading first time around and being able to adapt to it a lot better. I'm not sure whether this topic makes a lot more sense to me or if from reading past papers in the last couple of weeks on expected utility theorys and prospect theorys that it is all making sense at last.

I have discussed with my group about what was done in the lecture and we are beginning our group wiki project on the topic of 'decision framing' this week.

Lecture 3+4 : Measuring Utility

For this week's lecture we were asked to do the reading by Brandstatter, 'The Priority Heurisitic: Making Choices without Trade-Offs.' The reading was at first describing the Expected Utility and Value theories therefore giving us a bit of a refresh from Cognitive Psychology 2 module last year. It then however carried on to the prospect theory in which i know feel i have grasped a lot better than i did last year. It carried on to talk about this new idea of the priority heuristic. The expected utility and value theories were a bit easier to digest than the prospect theory and i was more aware of the basis of the theory of them, however after the class discussion the prospect theory was a lot clearer to me. With the prospect theory losses loom large than gains, so it takes into account that yes people do risk seek just as much if they think they are going to lose a lot of money as if they were going to win a lot. In the expected utility theory it didnt take into account that losses could be accounted for also. Decisions are made by basing their choices on a weighting function and a value of the prospect. It also accounts for the fact that small probabilities are over weighted and large ones are underweighted when making a decision.

An example of this would be a lottery ticket, the actual amount you spend is more than the probability of what you would be expected to win. Yet every week millions of people buy these tickets spend at least a £1.00 holding out for the small hope that they might win big.In class we then went on to discuss measuring utilities and conducted an exercise on utility functions. By asking questions relating to a series of choices i then plotted my results on two graphs, one for certainty equivalence and one for probability equivalence below.

You can see that with certainty equivalence in order to be indifferent between a lottery ticket with a 50/50 chance of winning £1000 or nothing the sum that would make me indifferent had to be £200. Any more and i would have definitely taken the money! Also when it came to the choice of either £1000 or £200 the sum of money i would get for certain was a lot higher at £500 as i was more willing to take a risk knowing i wasn't going to lose and get nothing, so it needed to be a larger amount to make me indifferent.

With the probability equivalence graph you can see that when more money is involved again the probability has to be higher for me to consider the risk in an equal light to the certain amount. However i'm never really game unless the probability is fairly high!! This is just my opinion but being a student money is precious and my decision making is NOT risk based!! As how it may have been a few years ago when i didn't have too much to gamble with and no debt!

The reading for next week is on decision framing, my group is reading the one by Mandel, Gain-loss, framing and choice. I'm hoping that im going to enjoy this and grasp it much easier than the previous two lectures as our group is struggling to decide which topic to do for our mid term wiki!!