Psychology 3130A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Decision-Making, Psych, Satisficing

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3130A/B
• Professor: John Paul Minda

Document Summary

Decision making is about reducing uncertainty, minimizing risk and maximizing benefit. Decisions that are made with some degree of explicit awareness often involves several steps. Identification: person identifies the need to make a decision, framing a decision involves stating the decision in terms of known costs and benefits, or perceived gains and losses, generation, the decision maker begins to generate alternatives. Is affected by several factors; individual, cognitive or environmental: judgment, alternatives are evaluated, both availability and representativeness can affect how alternatives are. Difficulties and challenges assessed and evaluated: sometimes there are too many choices, other challenges arise when costs and benefits are comparable across many alternatives, or when the alternatives are orthogonal or not directly comparable. Probability theories: baron described three ways in which people make sense of probability, frequency theories suggest that humans make probability judgements on the basis of their knowledge of prior frequency events. If something can never happen, the probability is 0. 0.