The futility of decision making research

Weiss, David J.; Shanteau, James

doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.08.018

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In research, building explanatory models for explanation's sake (i.e., basic research) could be considered as an important intermediate stage that provides an ever deeper understanding of various causal dynamics underlying disorders, creating the very possibility of conceptualizing new treatments and treatment targets. However, ultimately, the value of such explanatory models will depend on how actionable they are for improving clinical outcomes (see Weiss and Shanteau, 2021, for a related discussion).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in Computational Psychiatry: A Review of Current Challenges

Karvelis¹,

Paulus²,

Diaconescu³

2022

Preprint

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Bringing precision to the understanding and treatment of mental disorders requires instruments for studying clinically relevant individual differences. One promising approach is the development of computational assays: integrating computational models with cognitive tasks to infer latent patient-specific disease processes in brain computations. While recent years have seen many methodological advancements in computational modelling and many cross-sectional patient studies, much less attention has been paid to basic psychometric properties (reliability and construct validity) of the computational measures provided by the assays. In this review, we assess the extent of this issue by examining emerging empirical evidence. To contextualize this, we also provide a more general perspective on key developments that are needed for translating computational assays to clinical practice. Emerging evidence suggests that most computational measures show poor-to-moderate reliability and often provide little improvement over simple behavioral measures. Furthermore, behavioral and computational measures used to test computational accounts of mental disorders show a lack of convergent validity, which compromises their interpretability. Taken together, these issues pose a risk of invalidating previous findings and undermining ongoing research efforts using computational assays to study individual (and even group) differences. We suggest that cross-sectional single-task designs, which currently dominate the research landscape, are partly to blame for these problems and therefore are not suitable for solving them. Instead, reliability and construct validity need to be studied more systematically using longitudinal designs with batteries of tasks. Finally, to enable clinical applications, it will be necessary to establish predictive and longitudinal validity, and to make the assays more efficient and less burdensome.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Differences in Computational Psychiatry: A Review of Current Challenges

Karvelis¹,

Paulus²,

Diaconescu³

2022

Preprint

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“…Absolutely not! 4 Like many others, I believe that there is a serious need for critical treatments of the ways behavioral decision research is conducted (see Weiss & Shanteau, 2021 for a recent plea). But the nuance and complexity of the subject matter calls for careful historical, methodological, rhetorical, and conceptual considerations that go beyond what RRW currently have to offer (see Bennett & Hacker, 2003; Gozli, 2019; Maraun, 2003; Rozeboom, 1970; Smith, 1986; Soyland, 1994; Zuriff, 1985).…”

Section: Concluding Thoughtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral decision research is not a Linda problem: Comment on Regenwetter et al. (2022).

Kellen¹

2022

Decision

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Regenwetter et al. (2022) argue that research on decision-making is plagued with conjunction fallacies or “Linda Effects.” As a case study, they provide a critical analysis of Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal article on Prospect Theory and its 1992 sequel. This commentary evaluates their criticisms and ultimately finds them to be predicated on a number of misconceptions. As argued below, a reliance on stylized effects at the aggregate level is perfectly legitimate when dismissing a received view and first proposing a new account that organizes said effects in theoretically-meaningful ways.

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“…In relation to this structure and the normative component derived from it, empirical research in the cognitive psychology of decision making has been developing since the 1950s. Weiss and Shateau (2021) , highlight that in the 1950s Edwards (1992) , the founder of the psychology of decision making, began to carry out laboratory experiments to unravel the way in which people actually decide. His experiments, which became the reference of subsequent generations and in particular of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases program, have two fundamental characteristics: firstly, the provisions of the SEU are set as a normative reference, and the experimental work has the aim of evaluating when and how the human decision maker deviates from the requirements of the SEU.…”

Section: Bounded Rationality Is Bounded By the Decision Making Programmementioning

confidence: 99%

Bounded rationality, enactive problem solving, and the neuroscience of social interaction

2023

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This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decision making, which stems from the subjective expected utility theory of Savage (1954) that itself extended the analysis by Von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). On this view, the cognitive psychology of decision making precisely reflects the conceptual structure of formal decision theory. This article shows that there is an alternative way to understand decision making by recovering Newell and Simon’s account of problem solving, developed in the framework of bounded rationality, and inserting it into the more recent research program of embodied cognition. Herbert Simon emphasized the importance of problem solving and differentiated it from decision making, which he considered a phase downstream of the former. Moreover according to Simon the centre of gravity of the rationality of the action lies in the ability to adapt. And the centre of gravity of adaptation is not so much in the internal environment of the actor as in the pragmatic external environment. The behaviour adapts to external purposes and reveals those characteristics of the system that limit its adaptation. According to Simon (1981), in fact, environmental feedback is the most effective factor in modelling human actions in solving a problem. In addition, his notion of problem space signifies the possible situations to be searched in order to find that situation which corresponds to the solution. Using the language of embodied cognition, the notion of problem space is about the possible solutions that are enacted in relation to environmental affordances. The correspondence between action and the solution of a problem conceptually bypasses the analytic phase of the decision and limits the role of symbolic representation. In solving any problem, the search for the solution corresponds to acting in ways that involve recursive feedback processes leading up to the final action. From this point of view, the new term enactive problem solving summarizes this fusion between bounded and embodied cognition. That problem solving involves bounded cognition means that it is through the problem solver’s enactive interaction with environmental affordances, and especially social affordances that it is possible to construct the processes required for arriving at a solution. Lastly the concept of enactive problem solving is also able to explain the mechanisms underlying the adaptive heuristics of rational ecology. Its adaptive function is effective both in practical and motor tasks as well as in abstract and symbolic ones.

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The futility of decision making research

Cited by 14 publications

References 33 publications

Individual Differences in Computational Psychiatry: A Review of Current Challenges

Individual Differences in Computational Psychiatry: A Review of Current Challenges

Behavioral decision research is not a Linda problem: Comment on Regenwetter et al. (2022).

Bounded rationality, enactive problem solving, and the neuroscience of social interaction

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