Judgement and decision making

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with two related processes – judgement and decision making. We start off by looking at how we make judgements, specifically considering the role that probability judgements, for example availability and representativeness heuristics, play in people’s probability judgements. We provide some judgement examples for you to try and take a look at how heuristics impact the real-world judgement and decision making example of medical diagnosis. We also explore Bayseian inference and consider whether natural-frequency information (in contrast to laboratory based studies of judgement) facilitates judgement-making. In the last part of the chapter, we explore dual processes of judgement, the idea that we can use System 1 thinking to make fast intuitive judgements and System 2 to make slower more considered judgements.