The reading for the first lecture that i had to do was based on 'Reasoning the fast and frugal way'. The paper that our group was given was by Gigerenzer and Goldstein, it was one of the more intense papers i feel once having discussed them in class last week and contained a LOT of theory. When i started to read the paper in all honestly i was confused and found it a struggle, in order to try and get past this hurdle i referred to the textbook Judgement and decision making, by David Hardman and read up on fast and frugal reasoning. The textbook gave an easier interpretation of how you would go about making judgements and the theory behind it. After i understood better i then tackled the paper and found it easier to read, however still a slight struggle to digest the huge quantities of information.
In class once reformed in our groups we began to discuss the paper, this helped hugely as we all understood certain aspects better than others so were able to assist each other in constructing the presentation. The presentation went ok... however as it was the first we were all quite rusty and although we knew what we meant it was difficult to find the right words to get it across to the class!
In all the first two lectures and readings have taught me a lot about judgements, and i am much more to grips with the whole concept of the fast and frugal way now. Making judgements based on one single cue rather than looking and calculating all the alternatives makes sense to me. I feel this is the way in which my everyday decisions are conducted, although i would like to think i take everything into account i believe my mind is definitely not a 'supercalculator'. As we saw in the other papers how the jury and the judge base their decisions, everyone would hope and like to think yes they look at all the evidence, but realistically looking at this theory i am now very sceptical!
The reading for next week is to do with the priority heuristic so i am going to start reading that now and will see how i get on!
Hi Danielle,
ReplyDeleteWell done on getting the blog up and running, and making your first entry. These are good honest comments. Having now read the paper by Gigerenzer and Goldstein, and listened to the class talks, what do you think G&G mean when they suggest that judgments are "fast and frugal"?
After reading the paper I think G&G mean that the judgements are made in a much simpler and quicker way than judgements being made by the classical rationality theory. Judgements are based on the first piece of information (cue) that is available to them at the time and their decision is based entirely on this. Rather than looking at all the alternatives and weighing up the probabilities. They are suggesting that unlike what we believe to be the process of a huge decision based on all the evidence we do tend to make decisions based on our most recent, or highest ranking cues!
ReplyDeleteYup, that's about it. And, of course, in the Gigerenzer and Goldstein paper they found that the Take The Best heuristic achieved about the same level of accuracy as more integrative methods, but by looking up fewer cues on average.
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