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Biomedical subjects

E Shafir

Publications and source records attributed to E Shafir.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

On the pursuit and misuse of useless information.

Decision makers often pursue noninstrumental information--information that appears relevant but, if simply available, would have no impact on choice. Once they pursue such information, people then use it to make their decision. Consequently, the pursuit of information that would have had no impact on choice leads people to make choices they would not otherwise have made. The pursuit of noninstrumental information is documented and its effects on ensuing decisions are explored in a variety of social, consumer, and strategic situations. The causes and implications of this pattern are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Medical decision making in situations that offer multiple alternatives.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether situations involving multiple options can paradoxically influence people to choose an option that would have been declined if fewer options were available. DESIGN: Mailed survey containing medical scenarios formulated in one of two versions. PARTICIPANTS: Two groups of physicians: members of the Ontario College of Family Physicians (response rate = 77%; n = 287) and neurologists and neurosurgeons affiliated with the North American Symptomatic Carotid Endarterectomy Trial (response rate = 84%; n = 352). One group of legislators belonging to the Ontario Provincial Parliament (response rate = 32%; n = 41). INTERVENTION: The basic version of each scenario presented a choice between two options. The expanded version presented three options: the original two plus a third. The two versions otherwise contained identical information and were randomly assigned. OUTCOME MEASURES: Participants treatment recommendations. RESULTS: In one scenario involving a patient with osteoarthritis, family physicians were less likely to prescribe a medication when deciding between two medications than when deciding about only one medication (53% vs 72%; P < .005). Apparently, the difficulty in deciding between the two medications led some physicians to recommend not starting either. Similar discrepancies were found in decisions made by neurologists and neurosurgeons concerning carotid artery surgery and by legislators concerning hospital closures. CONCLUSIONS: The introduction of additional options can increase decision difficulty and, hence, the tendency to choose a distinctive option or maintain the status quo. Awareness of this cognitive bias may lead to improved decision making in complex medical situations.

Bias↗
PubMed1993

Ampliative inference: on choosing a probability distribution.

Ampliative inference is the choice of a probability distribution on the basis of incomplete information. We consider some psychological and normative questions that arise about this kind of reasoning. The discussion is largely tutorial although a substantive hypothesis is also advanced.

Decision Making↗
PubMed1993

Choosing versus rejecting: why some options are both better and worse than others.

A previously unobserved pattern of choice behavior is predicted and corroborated. In line with the principle of compatibility, according to which the weighting of inputs is enhanced by their compatibility with output, the positive and negative dimensions of options (their pros and cons) are expected to loom larger when one is choosing and when one is rejecting, respectively. Subjects are presented with pairs of options, one of which--the enriched option--has more positive as well as more negative dimensions than does the other, impoverished, option. Because positive dimensions are weighted more heavily in choosing than in rejecting, and negative dimensions are weighted more heavily in rejecting than in choosing, the enriched option tends to be chosen and rejected relatively more often than the impoverished option. These findings are extended to nonbinary decision problems, and their implications for the rational theory of choice and for everyday decisions are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Thinking through uncertainty: nonconsequential reasoning and choice.

When thinking under uncertainty, people often do not consider appropriately each of the relevant branches of a decision tree, as required by consequentialism. As a result they sometimes violate Savage's sure-thing principle. In the Prisoner's Dilemma game, for example, many subjects compete when they know that the opponent has competed and when they know that the opponent has cooperated, but cooperate when they do not know the opponent's response. Newcomb's Problem and Wason's selection task are also interpreted as manifestations of nonconsequential decision making and reasoning. The causes and implications of such behavior, and the notion of quasi-magical thinking, are discussed.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Reason-based choice.

This paper considers the role of reasons and arguments in the making of decisions. It is proposed that, when faced with the need to choose, decision makers often seek and construct reasons in order to resolve the conflict and justify their choice, to themselves and to others. Experiments that explore and manipulate the role of reasons are reviewed, and other decision studies are interpreted from this perspective. The role of reasons in decision making is considered as it relates to uncertainty, conflict, context effects, and normative decision rules.

Choice Behavior↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Similarity, plausibility, and judgments of probability.

Judging the strength of an argument may underlie many reasoning and decision-making tasks. In this article, we focus on "category-based" arguments, in which the premises and conclusion are of the form All members of C have property P, where C is a natural category. An example is "Dobermans have sesamoid bones. Therefore, German shepherds have sesamoid bones." The strength of such an argument is reflected in the judged probability that the conclusion is true given that the premises are true. The processes that mediate such probability judgments depend on whether the predicate is "blank"--an unfamiliar property that does not enter the reasoning process (e.g., "have sesamoid bones")--or "non-blank"--a relatively familiar property that is easier to reason from (e.g., "can bite through wire"). With blank predicates, probability judgments are based on similarity relations between the premise and conclusion categories. With non-blank predicates, probability judgements are based on both similarity relations and the plausibility of premises and conclusion.

Decision Making↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Extracting the coherent core of human probability judgement: a research program for cognitive psychology.

Human intuition is a rich and useful guide to uncertain events in the environment but suffers from probabilistic incoherence in the technical sense. Developing methods for extracting a coherent body of judgement that is maximally consistent with a person's intuition is a challenging task for cognitive psychology, and also relevant to the construction of artificial expert systems. The present article motivates this problem, and outlines one approach to it.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Uncertainty and the difficulty of thinking through disjunctions.

This paper considers the relationship between decision under uncertainty and thinking through disjunctions. Decision situations that lead to violations of Savage's sure-thing principle are examined, and a variety of simple reasoning problems that often generate confusion and error are reviewed. The common difficulty is attributed to people's reluctance to think through disjunctions. Instead of hypothetically traveling through the branches of a decision tree, it is suggested, people suspend judgement and remain at the node. This interpretation is applied to instances of decision making, information search, deductive and inductive reasoning, probabilistic judgement, games, puzzles and paradoxes. Some implications of the reluctance to think through disjunctions, as well as potential corrective procedures, are discussed.

Decision Making↗