The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making

by Scott Plous

Book Overview

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING offers a comprehensive introduction to the field with a strong focus on the social aspects of decision making processes. Winner of the prestigious... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0070504776
• ISBN13: 9780070504776
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A lot of materials in this Great Book

This is a very dense book, relatively easy to read, and very2 helpful. I love Blink and The Tipping Point, but this book probably has much much more materials, arguably more than 5 times of inside that those two best sellers combined. I am very interested in the popular psycology stuffs, and Influence by Cialdini is my fav. So this book in some way give you the same chockful of surprises and new insight that will change the way you think. I came across recomended by a University of Chicago MBA -email friend- who has much similar books favourites and he recomended this highly, and i absolutely agree and i would be glad to recommend this to anyone interested in human behaviour and psychology of bias. MBA students should read this one and surely will enjoy this. I always draw, marks and put notes on my book and i think i end up marking so much of the materials. Section one: Perception, Memory and Context Section two: How Questions affect answers Section three: Model of Decision making Section Four: Heurictis and Biases. Section five: The Social side of judgment and decision making Section six: Common traps. Some will complain that this book derived from a lot of previous psychological research, i agree, so for the psychology veteran out there, this might not the right book for you, but for most of us, this book will enlight, entertain and amuse us all...

Excellent and insightful.

This is a fascinating book analyzing how we are all far less Cartesian than we think. In other words, a slew of predictable human bias flaws what we feel is our own objective judgment. The author eminently demonstrates this point by forcing the reader to take a 39 questions test at the beginning of the book. This test is stuffed with all the traps that illustrate the human judgment flaws that he analyzes thoroughly in following specific chapters. You can view the test as a very entertaining IQ test from hell. The questions seem often simple. But, they are not. Other times, they are obviously difficult. I got a bit more than half of them correct. This was mainly because I had some knowledge or experience regarding certain traps the questions presented. I had made the mistake before. So, I learned from that. When I did not have any prior knowledge of a question, my results were very human, meaning not that good. But, learning the correct answer was both fun and educating. The author touches on several fascinating probability and statistic concepts. One of them being the Bayes theorem, which suggests that medical screen test can be highly unreliable despite being touted as 80% to 90% accurate. In other words, you better understand the Bayes theorem better than the medical specialists who screen you for various diseases. Because, based on the author's study, doctors don't have a clue. Another chapter had an excellent discussion on correlation vs. causation. This includes some tricky nuances that many analysts in the financial industry trip upon. Another interesting probability concept is why it takes only 23 people in a room to have greater than a 50% that two of them share the same birthday. This seems impossible, but it is true. The book has obviously a lot more than I am letting on here. I am not going to ruin it for you. It is really fun, educating, and interesting to read. You will also learn a whole lot about how you think, how others think, and how people think in groups. You will also understand how tricky it is to ask truly open and objective questions. Also, polls that seem objective are not due to the subjective structure of the question. I think you will enjoy this book, and I strongly recommend it.

Changes the way you think about everything

Simply put, this is one of those books that changes they way you think. It's one of those things that once you learn it, you wonder how you could've possibly gotten along in life without knowing it. In a certain sense, I found this book disappointing. Disappointing, because after reading it, I excitedly searched for more information on the subject, but was unable to find another text nearly as accessible or informative in so few pages. Incredible.Nevermind psychology, anyone interested in any form of political science or economics will find that this book opens a lot of philosophical doors they didn't know were there before, and changes the way they look at old problems or current rhetoric. An excellent intro to behavioral economics.

Entertaining, educational and effective

Scott Plous creates an effective learning experience by entrapping you into revealing your own personal psychology of decision-making...if only to yourself. It is an extremely entertaining and educational method that holds you from the first page to the last. Whether you're an academic interested in a useful textbook tool or a lay person, manager or other professional reliant on decision-making, you'll enjoy and appreciate this book.