scholarly journals Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo Mercier ◽  
Dan Sperber
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Ceteris Paribus ◽  
Psychology Of Reasoning ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Erroneous Beliefs ◽  
Reasoning Tasks

AbstractReasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Confirmation bias in decision making for fingerprints, DNA and eyewitness evidence cannot be explained by cognitive style or thinking dispositions.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Edgcumbe
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cognitive Style ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Criminal Case ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Thinking Dispositions ◽  
Evaluation Of Evidence ◽  
Facial Composite

Pre-existing beliefs about the background or guilt of a suspect can bias the subsequent evaluation of evidence for forensic examiners and lay people alike. This biasing effect, called the confirmation bias, has influenced legal proceedings in prominent court cases such as that of Brandon Mayfield. Today many forensic providers attempt to train their examiners against these cognitive biases. Nine hundred and forty-two participants read a fictional criminal case and received either neutral, incriminating or exonerating evidence (fingerprint, eyewitness, or DNA) before providing an initial rating of guilt. Participants then viewed ambiguous evidence (alibi, facial composite, handwriting sample or informant statement) before providing a final rating of guilt. Final guilt ratings were higher for all evidence conditions (neutral, incriminating or exonerating) following exposure to the ambiguous evidence. This provides evidence that the confirmation bias influences the evaluation of evidence.

scholarly journals A survey of methods for evaluating mini-publics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Sufficient Information ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Decision Making

AbstractPublic participation has become increasingly necessary to connect a wide range of knowledge and various values to agenda setting, decision-making and policymaking. In this context, deliberative democratic concepts, especially “mini-publics,” are gaining attention. Generally, mini-publics are conducted with randomly selected lay citizens who provide sufficient information to deliberate on issues and form final recommendations. Evaluations are conducted by practitioner researchers and independent researchers, but the results are not standardized. In this study, a systematic review of existing research regarding practices and outcomes of mini-publics was conducted. To analyze 29 papers, the evaluation methodologies were divided into 4 categories of a matrix between the evaluator and evaluated data. The evaluated cases mainly focused on the following two points: (1) how to maintain deliberation quality, and (2) the feasibility of mini-publics. To create a new path to the political decision-making process through mini-publics, it must be demonstrated that mini-publics can contribute to the decision-making process and good-quality deliberations are of concern to policy-makers and experts. Mini-publics are feasible if they can contribute to the political decision-making process and practitioners can evaluate and understand the advantages of mini-publics for each case. For future research, it is important to combine practical case studies and academic research, because few studies have been evaluated by independent researchers.

scholarly journals Results of the Behavioral Health Readiness Evaluation and Decision-Making Instrument Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 186 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 142-152
Author(s):  
Justin M Curley ◽  
Katie L Nugent ◽  
Kristina M Clarke-Walper ◽  
Elizabeth A Penix ◽  
James B Macdonald ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Behavioral Health ◽  
User Satisfaction ◽  
Safety Issue ◽  
Walter Reed Army Institute ◽  
End User ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Decision Making Support

ABSTRACT Introduction Recent reports have demonstrated behavioral health (BH) system and individual provider challenges to BH readiness success. These pose a risk to winning on the battlefield and present a significant safety issue for the Army. One of the most promising areas for achieving better BH readiness results lies in improving readiness decision-making support for BH providers. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) has taken the lead in addressing this challenge by developing and empirically testing such tools. The results of the Behavioral Health Readiness Evaluation and Decision-Making Instrument (B-REDI) field study are herein described. Methods The B-REDI study received WRAIR Institutional Review Board approval, and BH providers across five U.S. Army Forces Command installations completed surveys from September 2018 to March 2019. The B-REDI tools/training were disseminated to 307 providers through random clinic assignments. Of these, 250 (81%) providers consented to participate and 149 (60%) completed both initial and 3-month follow-up surveys. Survey items included a wide range of satisfaction, utilization, and proficiency-level outcome measures. Analyses included examinations of descriptive statistics, McNemar’s tests pre-/post-B-REDI exposure, Z-tests with subgroup populations, and chi-square tests with demographic comparisons. Results The B-REDI resulted in broad, statistically significant improvements across the measured range of provider proficiency-level outcomes. Net gains in each domain ranged from 16.5% to 22.9% for knowledge/awareness (P = .000), from 11.1% to 15.8% for personal confidence (P = .001-.000), and from 6.2% to 15.1% for decision-making/documentation (P = .035-.002) 3 months following B-REDI initiation, and only one (knowledge) failed to maintain a statistically significant improvement in all of its subcategories. The B-REDI also received high favorability ratings (79%-97% positive) across a wide array of end-user satisfaction measures. Conclusions The B-REDI directly addresses several critical Army BH readiness challenges by providing tangible decision-making support solutions for BH providers. Providers reported high degrees of end-user B-REDI satisfaction and significant improvements in all measured provider proficiency-level domains. By effectively addressing the readiness decision-making challenges Army BH providers encounter, B-REDI provides the Army BH health care system with a successful blueprint to set the conditions necessary for providers to make more accurate and timely readiness determinations. This may ultimately reduce safety and mission failure risks enterprise-wide, and policymakers should consider formalizing and integrating the B-REDI model into current Army BH practice.

The Application of Multicriteria Decision Analysis Methods in Health Care: A Literature Review

2021 ◽  
pp. 0272989X2110190
Author(s):  
Ilyas Khan ◽  
Liliane Pintelon ◽  
Harry Martin
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Medical Devices ◽  
Hybrid Methods ◽  
Multicriteria Decision Analysis ◽  
Multicriteria Decision ◽  
Health Care Decision ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Care Decision

Objectives The main objectives of this article are 2-fold. First, we explore the application of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods in different areas of health care, particularly the adoption of various MCDA methods across health care decision making problems. Second, we report on the publication trends on the application of MCDA methods in health care. Method PubMed was searched for literature from 1960 to 2019 in the English language. A wide range of keywords was used to retrieve relevant studies. The literature search was performed in September 2019. Articles were included only if they have reported an MCDA case in health care. Results and Conclusion The search yielded 8,318 abstracts, of which 158 fulfilled the inclusion criteria and were considered for further analysis. Hybrid methods are the most widely used methods in health care decision making problems. When it comes to single methods, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is the most widely used method followed by TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution), multiattribute utility theory, goal programming, EVIDEM (evidence and value: impact on decision making), evidential reasoning, discrete choice experiment, and so on. Interestingly, the usage of hybrid methods has been high in recent years. AHP is most widely applied in screening and diagnosing and followed by treatment, medical devices, resource allocation, and so on. Furthermore, treatment, screening and diagnosing, medical devices, and drug development and assessment got more attention in the MCDA context. It is indicated that the application of MCDA methods to health care decision making problem is determined by the nature and complexity of the health care problem. However, guidelines and tools exist that assist in the selection of an MCDA method.

scholarly journals Goal-driven active learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bougie ◽  
Ryutaro Ichise
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Real World ◽  
Imitation Learning ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Fixed Set ◽  
Complex Decision Making ◽  
Complex Decision

AbstractDeep reinforcement learning methods have achieved significant successes in complex decision-making problems. In fact, they traditionally rely on well-designed extrinsic rewards, which limits their applicability to many real-world tasks where rewards are naturally sparse. While cloning behaviors provided by an expert is a promising approach to the exploration problem, learning from a fixed set of demonstrations may be impracticable due to lack of state coverage or distribution mismatch—when the learner’s goal deviates from the demonstrated behaviors. Besides, we are interested in learning how to reach a wide range of goals from the same set of demonstrations. In this work we propose a novel goal-conditioned method that leverages very small sets of goal-driven demonstrations to massively accelerate the learning process. Crucially, we introduce the concept of active goal-driven demonstrations to query the demonstrator only in hard-to-learn and uncertain regions of the state space. We further present a strategy for prioritizing sampling of goals where the disagreement between the expert and the policy is maximized. We evaluate our method on a variety of benchmark environments from the Mujoco domain. Experimental results show that our method outperforms prior imitation learning approaches in most of the tasks in terms of exploration efficiency and average scores.

Offender-Centric Policing in Cases of Rape

2021 ◽  
pp. 002201832110274
Author(s):  
Philip NS Rumney ◽  
Duncan McPhee
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Sexual Offending ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Predatory Behaviour ◽  
Investigative Tool ◽  
Care And Support ◽  
History Of

The article explores the idea of ‘offender-centric’ policing in cases of rape, with its focus on suspect and offender admissions and behaviours. It features discussion of 11 cases, illustrating offender-centric pathways to charge or conviction, the challenges facing complainants, suspects and police officers, along with missed opportunities to focus on a suspect’s behaviour. The importance of victim care and support is discussed, and it is argued that victim care should accompany an offender-centric approach to rape investigation. It is also argued that there are potential dangers with offender-centric tactics, specifically, that without due care it may become a self-confirming investigative tool influenced by confirmation bias which may lead to flawed decision-making. The article concludes by arguing that offender-centric policing has benefits in those cases with suspects who engage in predatory behaviour, have a history of previously undisclosed sexual offending and domestic violence and other problematic behaviours. It also has value in focusing the attention of investigators on what steps were taken by a suspect to ascertain the complainant’s consent. While the offender-centric approach cannot address all investigative challenges in rape cases, it is a useful addition to existing strategies.

scholarly journals Risk Factors and Prediction Models for Venous Thromboembolism in Ambulatory Patients with Lung Cancer

Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 778
Author(s):  
Ann-Rong Yan ◽  
Indira Samarawickrema ◽  
Mark Naunton ◽  
Gregory M. Peterson ◽  
Desmond Yip ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Lung Cancer ◽  
Venous Thromboembolism ◽  
High Risk ◽  
Prediction Models ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Risk Models ◽  
Related Risk ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ambulatory Patients

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a significant cause of mortality in patients with lung cancer. Despite the availability of a wide range of anticoagulants to help prevent thrombosis, thromboprophylaxis in ambulatory patients is a challenge due to its associated risk of haemorrhage. As a result, anticoagulation is only recommended in patients with a relatively high risk of VTE. Efforts have been made to develop predictive models for VTE risk assessment in cancer patients, but the availability of a reliable predictive model for ambulate patients with lung cancer is unclear. We have analysed the latest information on this topic, with a focus on the lung cancer-related risk factors for VTE, and risk prediction models developed and validated in this group of patients. The existing risk models, such as the Khorana score, the PROTECHT score and the CONKO score, have shown poor performance in external validations, failing to identify many high-risk individuals. Some of the newly developed and updated models may be promising, but their further validation is needed.

Perceived Affordances and Regret in Online Travel Agencies

2021 ◽  
pp. 004728752110149
Author(s):  
Hwirim Jo ◽  
Namho Chung ◽  
Sunyoung Hlee ◽  
Chulmo Koo
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Regulatory Focus ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Cognitive Effort ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Impulsive Buying ◽  
Travel Agencies ◽  
Effective Decision Making ◽  
Online Travel ◽  
Online Travel Agencies

Despite the revolutionary system of online booking, the decision-making process for booking hotels is still very stressful for customers, who face much uncertainty. The wide range of products and great volume of information result in significant cognitive overload. Therefore, online travel agencies (OTAs) try to reduce customers’ cognitive effort requirements and to induce effective decision making by triggering potential actions through perceived affordance. This study aims to explore the influence of perceived affordance on purchase decisions and postpurchase emotion in the context of OTAs. The findings show that explicit affordance and hidden affordance significantly affect impulsive buying, thus resulting in postpurchase discomfort and regret. Additionally, the outcomes of a multiple group analysis revealed a significant moderating effect of regulatory focus orientation on impulsive buying and postpurchase regret during an overall purchase process involving OTAs.

Knowledge Management: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

2012 ◽  
Vol 01 (11) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Kamran Nazari ◽  
Mostafa Emami
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Critical Points ◽  
Organization Performance ◽  
Management Process ◽  
Dynamic Learning ◽  
Collective Wisdom ◽  
Theory To Practice ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Peter Drucker

Knowledge management is a process that helps organizations to find important information, select, organize and publish them; and it’s a proficiency that will be necessary for actions like solving problems, dynamic learning, decision making. Knowledge management can improve a wide range of organization performance properties by enabling company to more intelligent performance, but it’s not enough alone; because knowledge management to be useful needs undertaking staff to organization and their job, that accept the knowledge management process with spirit and heart and perform it (Wiig, 1999:14).Knowledge management is the leveraging of collective wisdom to increase responsiveness and innovation. It is important that you discern from this definition three critical points. This definition implies that three criteria must be met before information can be considered knowledge. » Knowledge is connected. It exists in a collection (collective wisdom) of multiple experiences and perspectives Knowledge management is a catalyst. It is an action – leveraging. Knowledge is always relevant to environmental conditions, and stimulates action in response to these conditions. Information that does not precipitate action of some kind is not knowledge. In the words of Peter Drucker, ‘‘Knowledge for the most part exists only in application.’’ » Knowledge is applicable in un-encountered environments. Information becomes knowledge when it is used to address novel situations for which no direct precedent exists. Information that is merely ‘‘plugged in’’ to a previously encountered model is not knowledge and lacks innovation.

scholarly journals Collective decision making by rational individuals

2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (44) ◽  
pp. E10387-E10396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Mann
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Rational Decision ◽  
Rational Decision Making ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Social Information Use

The patterns and mechanisms of collective decision making in humans and animals have attracted both empirical and theoretical attention. Of particular interest has been the variety of social feedback rules and the extent to which these behavioral rules can be explained and predicted from theories of rational estimation and decision making. However, models that aim to model the full range of social information use have incorporated ad hoc departures from rational decision-making theory to explain the apparent stochasticity and variability of behavior. In this paper I develop a model of social information use and collective decision making by fully rational agents that reveals how a wide range of apparently stochastic social decision rules emerge from fundamental information asymmetries both between individuals and between the decision makers and the observer of those decisions. As well as showing that rational decision making is consistent with empirical observations of collective behavior, this model makes several testable predictions about how individuals make decisions in groups and offers a valuable perspective on how we view sources of variability in animal, and human, behavior.

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