Expert Decision Making in a Complex Engineering Environment

Abstract

This study investigated the complex decisions made by engineers when conducting contaminated-land risk assessments. Experienced assessors studied summaries of site reports, which were composed of different combinations of relevant cues, and decided on the risk level of each site. Models from three theories of decision making were compared. Applying judgment analysis to develop a lens model provided the best account of the data, lending support to social judgment theory. A model based on a fast-and-frugal heuristic, the matching heuristic, did not fit the data as well; nor did a coherence model based on the theory of explanatory coherence. Comparison with decisions generated with the use of industry guidance showed only a moderate fit, suggesting that the standard procedure does not accurately represent how highly proficient domain practitioners make assessments in this context. Qualitative analyses of comments made by participants suggested that they used a combined approach that applied key cues as predicted by social judgment theory, integrated into a meaningful, coherent account, as predicted by the theory of explanatory coherence. Overall, these findings suggest a novel process in which a range of information is combined to form a coherent explanation of the data but in which key cues are more influential than others.

Training fast and frugal heuristics in military decision making

“…This continues until the end of the tree. Typically fast and frugal trees have around two to four cues and have been tested in wide range of applied domains, including engineering (Cropp, Banks, & Elghali, 2011), medical decision making (Smith & Gilhooly, 2006), and legal decision making (Dhami, 2003;Dhami & Ayton, 2001). Fast and frugal trees predict the decisions of domain experts in these studies as well as regression models, despite using less information and simpler computation than the more complex regression models.…”

Naturalistic decision making through argumentation: Resolving labour disputes

“…For example, in a coherent account, all the facts are explained or all the contradictory arguments are resolved. Coherence has been proposed as a basis for NDM (Cropp, Banks, & Elghali, 2011;McAndrew et al, 2009) based on the work of Thagard (1989), but these models do not distinguish between different forms of coherent representation. We suggest that both story building and argumentation-based decision-making are based on different forms of representation, but the aim of both is to be coherent.…”