The futility of decision making research.

We have each spent more than 50 years doing research that has had little impact. Even more lamentable is that our field, judgment and decision making (JDM), has on the whole had little impact during that span. We attribute that failure to the use of methodologies that emphasize testing models rather than looking for differences in behavior. The "cognitive revolution" led the field astray, toward the goal of studying model fit rather than comparing observable results. With modeling as the goal, experimentation was stultified. Simple tasks became dominant. Although a poor metaphor for real decision making, the gambling paradigm has lasted forever because the inputs to the decision are known to the researcher and thus easily modeled.

Individual expertise versus domain expertise.

Comments on the article by T. J. G. Tracey et al. (see record 2013-45602-001), which addressed the question of whether "psychotherapy is a profession without any expertise." In the past two decades, new insights have emerged on expertise in various domains, including psychotherapy. In particular, the present authors have developed a general, relativistic perspective on expertise that invokes performance-based criteria (Weiss & Shanteau, 2003, 2014). In this commentary, they highlight three distinctions that have emerged from recent research on expertise.

Physics envy: trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B) argue that classical probability (CP) fails to describe human decision processes accurately and should be supplanted by quantum probability. We accept the premise, but reject P&B's conclusion. CP is a prescriptive framework that has inspired a great deal of valuable research. Also, because CP is used across the sciences, it is a cornerstone of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Using stories to battle unintentional injuries: narratives in safety and health communication.

After 14 years of rising death rates due to unintentional injuries in the U.S., it is time to ask how safety messages can be redesigned to have a greater impact on risky behavior. To this end, many researchers have called for a new, narrative approach to prevention messages-based on persuasive stories about people who have suffered injuries and illnesses in the past. Still, there is scant evidence that story-based communications are more effective than equivalent non-narrative messages at changing actual (rather than self-reported) safety and health behavior. Our research examined the impact of injury stories on actual safety behavior in a controlled experimental setting at a US university. Teams of participants assembled a product (a child's swing) using written instructions. The instructions contained safety messages targeting assembly mistakes that have been linked to serious injuries in children who play on swings. Participant teams were randomly assigned to three conditions: assembly instructions containing story-based safety messages, instructions with concrete (but non-anecdotal) safety messages, and instructions with traditional abstract safety messages. After adjustment for covariates, story-based messages resulted in a 19 percent improvement in safety behavior, compared with non-narrative communications. Importantly, injury stories did not create undue fear of the message object, demonstrating that brief anecdotes about accident victims can convince people to take reasonable precautions without creating unwarranted alarm about risks.

Functional measurement analysis of brand equity: does brand name affect perceptions of quality?

This research project used Functional Measurement to examine how the brand name of consumer products impacts intended purchasing decisions. Thirty undergraduate students tested actual products from three different product categories (crayons, tissues, and tortilla chips). Each product category consisted of three different brands; one with high brand value, one with medium, and one with low brand (generic) value. For each brand, there were five conditions: 1) the product with the correct brand name; 2) the product with a switched brand name; 3) the product with another switched brand name; 4) the product alone with no brand name; and 5) the brand name alone with no product. Participants were unaware that products had been switched. After trying each product, participants rated their likelihood to purchase on a 9-point Likert scale: 1 being “definitely would not buy” and 9 being “definitely would buy.” Results revealed that perceptions of quality were dependent on both perceived product quality and brand name. Unexpectedly, results also showed that the strength of the brand equity effect is dependent on product type, e.g., chips showed the strongest brand effect. For most product categories, main effects and interactions were significant. Functional measurement analyses revealed that brand name effects were independent of product quality. In conclusion, the brand name associated with a product led people to evaluate quality of that product as either higher or lower depending on the strength of the brand name(AU)

Description of inpatient medication management using cognitive work analysis.

The purpose of this article was to describe key elements of an inpatient medication system using the cognitive work analysis method of Rasmussen et al (Cognitive Systems Engineering. Wiley Series in Systems Engineering; 1994). The work of nurses and physicians were observed in routine care of inpatients on a medical-surgical unit and attached ICU. Interaction with pharmacists was included. Preoperative, postoperative, and medical care was observed. Personnel were interviewed to obtain information not easily observable during routine work. Communication between healthcare workers was projected onto an abstraction/decomposition hierarchy. Decision ladders and information flow charts were developed. Results suggest that decision making on an inpatient medical/surgical unit or ICU setting is a parallel, distributed process. Personnel are highly mobile and often are working on multiple issues concurrently. In this setting, communication is key to maintaining organization and synchronization for effective care. Implications for research approaches to system and interface designs and decision support for personnel involved in the process are discussed.

Quantitative method of medication system interface evaluation.

The objective of this study was to develop a quantitative method of evaluating the user interface for medication system software. A detailed task analysis provided a description of user goals and essential activity. A structural fault analysis was used to develop a detailed description of the system interface. Nurses experienced with use of the system under evaluation provided estimates of failure rates for each point in this simplified fault tree. Means of estimated failure rates provided quantitative data for fault analysis. Authors note that, although failures of steps in the program were frequent, participants reported numerous methods of working around these failures so that overall system failure was rare. However, frequent process failure can affect the time required for processing medications, making a system inefficient. This method of interface analysis, called Software Efficiency Evaluation and Fault Identification Method, provides quantitative information with which prototypes can be compared and problems within an interface identified.

Empirical assessment of expertise.

The assessment of expertise is vital both in practical situations that call for expert judgment and in theoretical research on the psychology of experts. It can be difficult, however, to determine whether a judge is in fact performing expertly. Our goal was to develop an empirical measure of expert judgment. We argue that two necessary characteristics of expertise are discrimination of the various stimuli in the domain and consistent treatment of similar stimuli. We combine measures of these characteristics to form a ratio we call the Cochran-Weiss-Shanteau (CWS) index of expertise. The proposed index was demonstrated using two studies that distinguished experts from nonexperts based on their judgmental performance. The index provides new insights into expertise and offers a partial definition of expertise that may be useful in a variety of theoretical and applied settings. Potential applications of this research include selection, training, and evaluation of experts and of expert-machine systems.

Using the Internet to investigate consumer choice spaces.

Traditional investigations of consumer choice processes include a matrix of alternatives described by attributes. The researcher-created matrix presents a product option space for the participant. In this article, we propose an alternative methodological approach to consumer choice processes. Specifically, we investigate choice processes when a participant creates his/her own product space. We describe a Web-based program and methodology used to collect data for three customizable products. Empirical results indicate that consumers are willing and able to make choices from their own product space. This research provides a new avenue for exploring choice processes.