Understanding Decision Making

7^th July 2022 Understanding Decision Making – Dr. James Gray

James lectures to Physician Associates at Sheffield University on this subject and qualified it with the comment: “We don’t think about thinking”.  He gave a simple example about the process involved in buying a car; what are you looking for? The decision making is based upon your ‘values’, which are probably some of: price, size, safety aspects, colour, performance.  Herbert Simon called it ‘bounded rationality with the aim being to make a “good enough” decision.  The primary conclusion was that humans make decisions with a small number of variables, allocating a value to the variable within a time frame to arrive at a DECISION.  The term “satisficing” was introduced as “satisfying minimum requirements and that decisions could be based on ‘recollection’.

James then took us into some paper and pen exercises, giving us a list of about 20 items, once read to be recalled. The success rate of members varied from zero to about 10, which James was not surprised at as time pressures were exerted and as most members are retired ‘time pressures’ are long returned to the ‘memory bank’!

He the referred to a book called “Thinking Fast and Slow” by David Kahneman, covering heuristics (mental short cuts) and biases. Following this a challenging exercise was undertaken answering six questions that you were only allowed 12 secs to give your quick response to, an exercise in ‘rapid processing’ versus ‘analytical’.  There were also examples of representational bias which depend upon ‘description’ and ‘statistics’.

He concluded with reflecting upon thinking; what’s the alternative? Use time as a diagnostic tool; be aware of your state of mind and non-judgemental feedback.

Ian gave a very complementary Vote of thanks to this fascinating subject, admitting that he was trying to relate the subject processes to his work situation, “plenty to think about”!!                     AR