Decision Making (Cambridge Handbook of Thinking/Reasoning)

Fannie, it's definitely dehumanizing when people on Tinder become "jams on the shelf". One method that Grindr (gay Tinder) used to reduce the cognitive load of decision-making is to introduce filters for people to self-select the attributes of their ideal match (in contrast with other systems that provide a recommendation based on previous "choices"). It's frankly, disgusting and depressing (but, maybe not surprising?), both that the designers of the app decided to facilitate this superficial selection process, and that people willingly engage in it.

To Franceska's point about students' problem-selection in ITS's, the challenge isn't just deciding on the "optimal problem" for them to solve next, but in figuring out how to teach and scaffold appropriate problem-selection strategies. As novices, they don't have the full view of the problem space, nor is it clear that even if they did, they would be able to make a "rational" decision about which problem will be optimally beneficial for them to solve next. But, with this reading in mind, perhaps certain framings of the domain space and the inter-relationships of the problems (or topics, at a higher level) can help students make more "informed" decisions about their next problem to solve or topic to learn. In that way, even if the selection isn't the most optimal one, it might still be better than the decision they would have made, using only their local knowledge of the decision.

On a poetic note, the section on the multiple "selves" we consider, and our identities that are made salient got me thinking about this ee cummings poem:
www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/materiales/poemas/cummings,selves.htm

Or the studies where people make better investment decisions if they're shown pictures of themselves as senior citizens:
hbr.org/2013/06/you-make-better-decisions-if-you-see-your-senior-self

Are any of these “irrational” biases rational in a certain context? Can you justify why participants might have acted in a way that seemed irrational but actually makes sense when reframed?

Yes, I actually seek to learn about these precisely so I can use them to my advantage. For example, mental accounting can be useful to help save. If my money is treated as one large pool of assets, then I might be tempted to spend it frivolously. One of the reasons the money-in-seperate-envelopes budget method (or more modernly YNAB) is so effective is that it relies on mental accounting to force people to save even when they technically have enough money for a movie or something. Does this make sense to an Econ? No, but we are not Econs.

It’s mentioned in the paper that people have limited capacity combining information across attributes. Do you think computers can make better decisions than humans based on certain models? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of computers in making decisions?

Computers can make better decisions, depending on your definition of better. They can most definitely merge across attributes more reliably, as pretty much any linear classifier will demonstrate.

Which of these biases would you expect are overrepresented among PhD students if any? Which might be underrepresented?

I bet PhD students are more susceptible to delaying action due to the idea that more information might arrive. They are more likely to encounter unknown areas of a field. PhD students (in HCI at least) are probably more likely to notice priming effect, although I don't know that they can alter their behavior to avoid them.

- What are some examples of decision making in your own life which use the principles that were mentioned in the paper? How do you think these biases shape our career decisions as PhD students?:

I feel like the irrational decisions of repeated decision-making versus specific instances (e.g., when participants played a "game with equal chance to lose $500 or gain $2000 wouldn’t play a single time but would play five times. They were happier to play six times than five, but when told to imagine that they had already played five and asked if they wanted to play a sixth they declined.") provides a good example how HCI research to demonstrate that users will often say they would do something, yet when it comes down to actually doing it, they act in a completely different way. In this example, people hypothetically would not choose to play a sixth time, yet when placed in a situation to actually play a sixth time, they did. As HCI researchers, we need to keep in mind that people are irrational and that what they may say might not be exactly how they would actually use an artifact, user interface, etc.

- In terms of HCI research, what kind of tools can be designed or developed to help people make better decisions (or more rational decisions)? (You may have a different definition of what “better” decision is)

I feel like some of these findings about irrational behavior could be applied as behavior change interventions. For example, maybe a weight loss app can frame the user's goal in such a way that guides the user to go down one of these irrational decisions that will ultimately result in them being more likely to be motivated to do what's needed to lose weight. This is similar to the example about how decisions are framed matters (e.g., "75% lean sounds better than 25% fat; 3.7% crime rate sounds much more serious than “96.3% crime free”). The framing of a task might lead to more motivating behavior.