scholarly journals Certainty and Singular Causal Judgment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin O'Neill

In this paper, I map out broad aims, challenges, predictions, and implica- tions for the resulting intersection of singular causal judgment and metacognition that I (tentatively) call causal metacognition. First, I will overview research on sin- gular causal judgment, focusing on popular counterfactual theories that provide a formal framework for evaluating dependency relationships, as well as several compet- ing definitions of singular causal strength. Next, I will provide relevant background in the literature on metacognition for perception and decision-making, discussing major computational theories of metacognitive judgments. After covering the small amount of work on uncertainty in causal judgments, I will then argue that although singular causal judgments pose a particular problem for some theories of metacognition, coun- terfactual theories of singular causal judgment already provide testable predictions for confidence in causal judgments and can be extended to account for a wide range of patterns in confidence in singular causal judgments. Finally, I will summarize why we need a study of causal metacognition, and what empirical and theoretical advancements in that field might look like.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Icard ◽  
Jonathan F. Kominsky ◽  
Joshua Knobe

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation.


Author(s):  
Takeuchi Ayano

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.


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 ◽  
...  

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0272989X2110190
Author(s):  
Ilyas Khan ◽  
Liliane Pintelon ◽  
Harry Martin

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bougie ◽  
Ryutaro Ichise

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 004728752110149
Author(s):  
Hwirim Jo ◽  
Namho Chung ◽  
Sunyoung Hlee ◽  
Chulmo Koo

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 01 (11) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Kamran Nazari ◽  
Mostafa Emami

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (44) ◽  
pp. E10387-E10396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Mann

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 117954682095341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd C Villines ◽  
Mark J Cziraky ◽  
Alpesh N Amin

Real-world evidence (RWE) provides a potential rich source of additional information to the body of data available from randomized clinical trials (RCTs), but there is a need to understand the strengths and limitations of RWE before it can be applied to clinical practice. To gain insight into current thinking in clinical decision making and utility of different data sources, a representative sampling of US cardiologists selected from the current, active Fellows of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) were surveyed to evaluate their perceptions of findings from RCTs and RWE studies and their application in clinical practice. The survey was conducted online via the ACC web portal between 12 July and 11 August 2017. Of the 548 active ACC Fellows invited as panel members, 173 completed the survey (32% response), most of whom were board certified in general cardiology (n = 119, 69%) or interventional cardiology (n = 40, 23%). The survey results indicated a wide range of familiarity with and utilization of RWE amongst cardiologists. Most cardiologists were familiar with RWE and considered RWE in clinical practice at least some of the time. However, a significant minority of survey respondents had rarely or never applied RWE learnings in their clinical practice, and many did not feel confident in the results of RWE other than registry data. These survey findings suggest that additional education on how to assess and interpret RWE could help physicians to integrate data and learnings from RCTs and RWE to best guide clinical decision making.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
T. Yu. Druzhilovskaya ◽  
E. S. Druzhilovskaya

The article presents the results of a study of the possibilities to improve approaches to generating a report on financial results as an information base for making strategic decisions. It critically analyses the significance of the changes in this report, stipulated by the draft federal accounting standard for the non-state sector “Financial statements of the organization” (FAS FS), which should come into force from 2021. The authors identify and systematize the main changes planned by the FAS FS draft in report on financial results formation, including not only adjusting certain articles, but also improving the approaches to the presentation of a number of indicators. The importance of each of these changes, their positive and negative significance for the persons making strategic decisions is determined; the main problematic and debatable issues to improve the formation of the report on financial results from the perspective of users of the reporting are identified. An example of the form of the report on financial results is provided, aimed at presenting the reliable and understandable information necessary for decision-making users. The results of the study can be useful to a wide range of readers interested in the problems of forming a report on financial results, and can also be applied in the practical work of the accounting departments of organizations, in the educational process of higher educational institutions and in the creation and improvement of relevant regulatory documents on accounting.


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