GERD GIGERENZER ON IGNORING INFORMATION FOR BETTER DECISIONS

Who: Gerd Gigerenzer, Director, Max Planck Institute, Berlin
What: The Rationality of Heuristics: Ignoring Information for Better Decisions
Where: Westminster Business School, Hogg Lecture Theatre
When: 17h15-19h

The academic year in London will get off to a stimulating start as one of Psychology’s leading intellectuals, Gerd Gigerenzer, will take the stage on Tuesday September 23rd, 2008 to kick off the Economics of Behavior and Decision Making seminar in London.

Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. His book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious was one of six nominees for the 2008 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has published several other academic books on heuristics including, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics), Heuristics and the Law (Dahlem Workshop Reports) (with Christoph Engel), Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty (Evolution and Cognition), and Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series).

ABOUT GIGERENZER:
Gerd Gigerenzer’s CV
Through Analysis, Gut Reaction Gains Credibility, The New York Times.
Smart Heuristics: Gerd Gigerenzer at Edge.org
Gigerenzer’s Books

NEW FACULTY OR GRAD STUDENT IN LONDON? JOIN THE EBDM SEMINAR EMAIL LIST:
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The full schedule of talks at the Economics of Behaviour and Decision Making seminar series is maintained at http://www.decisionresearchlab.com/ebdm/

CALL FOR PAPERS: SJDM 2008 PRE-CONFERENCE. DEADLINE SEPT 1, 2008

Society for Judgment and Decision Making Preconference 2008: Using Human Nature to Improve Human Life. November 14, 2008. Gleacher Center, Chicago, IL.

The University of Chicago’s Center for Decision Research announces that it will host a preconference to this year’s SJDM Annual Meeting, featuring research on how basic knowledge about human nature (fundamental motives, habits, biases, limitations, etc.) can be used to improve individual and social welfare. The preconference will be held on November 14, 2008, and will take place at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago.

PRECONFERENCE THEME:

Research on human judgment and decision making has enriched our understanding of some of the basic features and limitations of human nature. People do not operate with perfect knowledge, unlimited mental capacity, complete self-control, or a perfect ability to appreciate the future as much as the present. These basic features of human nature do not make people inherently flawed, just inherently human. Attempts to improve human life require an understanding of these basic features of human nature in order to design policies and interventions that work within the people’s inherent constraints. Public policy has long been guided by a view of human nature provided by homo economicus, but public policy should also be informed by the psychological understanding of homo sapiens. Those designing organ donation policies, for instance, would do well to note that people are heavily influenced by the default option. Those designing savings programs would do well to note that people value future dollars much less than current dollars. And those designing weight loss programs would do well to note that people will eat whatever portion size is placed in front of them. Psychological research has a role to play in public policy debates and in designing social welfare interventions. This conference will provide a forum in which to present that research.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The Center for Decision Research invites 1-page abstracts for oral presentations of research, which address any systematic human tendency, bias, limitation, or cognitive capacity that can be used to inform interventions or policy to improve human life. Discussion of specific intervention or policy implications is not required, but is encouraged. Faculty members, postdocs and graduate students, and anyone with interesting research to present are all eligible to submit. Submissions must be received by September 1, 2008, and should submitted with your registration for the conference through our website: http://www.chicagocdr.org/sjdm_precon.html

REGISTRATION:

Attendance for the preconference is limited. To reserve a space for yourself, please visit our conference website: http://www.chicagocdr.org/sjdm_precon.html

PROGRAM:

The preconference will last a full business day, organized in two sessions which will feature Cornell University’s Brian Wansink (discussing his work related to obesity and health) and Princeton’s Eldar Shafir (discussing his work on poverty) alongside the other presenters.

Photo Credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/esspea/288035510/

24th ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL MEETING OF THE BRUNSWIK SOCIETY, NOV 13-14, 2008

Call for Papers and Participation

Dear friends and colleagues,

The 24th Annual International Meeting of the Brunswik Society will be held on Thursday and Friday, November 13-14, 2008 in Chicago, Illinois, at the Hilton Chicago. The program begins at 12:00 noon on Thursday afternoon, and ends at 6:00 Friday afternoon. We invite papers and/or panel discussion proposals on any theoretical or empirical/applied topic directly related to Egon Brunswik’s philosophy and paradigm. Please send a brief abstract (100 words), and indicate whether the paper/discussion is theoretical or empirical, to Jim Holzworth by Friday, July 18th. Kindly respect this submission due date. The organizing committee is: Jim Holzworth Jim.Holzworth@uconn.edu, Mandeep Dhami mkd25@cam.ac.uk, and Elise Weaver elise_weaver@yahoo.com. The meeting is held concurrently with the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting and just before the Judgment and Decision Society meeting. More details about the 2008 meeting, including registration instructions, will be posted on the Brunswik Society website, at http://brunswik.org.

SMDM 2008, OCTOBER 19-22, 2008, PHILADELPHIA

We are pleased to invite you to submit an abstract to the 30th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making, being held in Philadelphia this October. The meeting theme is “Comparative Effectiveness Research.”

Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to present their work at the SMDM 30th Annual Meeting, October 19 – 22, 2008 in Philadelphia, PA. Accepted abstracts will be published online in Medical Decision Making, SMDM’s peer-reviewed scientific journal.

The deadline for abstract submissions is Friday, June 6, 2008 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. For more information about abstracts or to submit an abstract, go to abstracts. To learn more about the SMDM 30th Annual Meeting, go to meeting. To make hotel reservations for the meeting, go to reservations.

Meeting Co-Chairs:
Sandy Schwartz, MD and Seema Sonnad, PhD

Scientific Review Committee Co-Chairs:
Heather Taffet Gold, PhD, and Lisa Prosser, PhD

BLOOD SUGAR AND HEURISTIC USE

Now this is interesting (*):

ABSTRACT:

This experiment used the attraction effect to test the hypothesis that ingestion of sugar can reduce reliance on intuitive, heuristic-based decision making. In the attraction effect, a difficult choice between two options is swayed by the presence of a seemingly irrelevant “decoy” option. We replicated this effect and the finding that the effect increases when people have depleted their mental resources performing a previous self-control task. Our hypothesis was based on the assumption that effortful processes require and consume relatively large amounts of glucose (brain fuel), and that this use of glucose is why people use heuristic strategies after exerting self-control. Before performing any tasks, some participants drank lemonade sweetened with sugar, which restores blood glucose, whereas others drank lemonade containing a sugar substitute. Only lemonade with sugar reduced the attraction effect. These results show one way in which the body (blood glucose) interacts with the mind (self-control and reliance on heuristics).

REFERENCE:

Masicampo, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (2008). Toward a physiology of dual-process reasoning and judgment: Lemonade, willpower, and effortful rule-based analysis. Psychological Science, 19, 255-260.

Download it while it is hot.

(*) When Decision Science News says that “this” is interesting, it means the finding that sugar can affect the particular heuristic employed is interesting.

For a more classically cognitive model of how heuristics are selected from the adaptive toolbox, see:

• Rieskamp, Jörg & Otto, Philipp E. (2006). SSL: A Theory of How People Learn to Select Strategies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135(2), 207-236.

For a blend of the biological and the cognitive, see:

• Mata, Rui; Schooler, Lael J.; Rieskamp, Jörg (2007). The aging decision maker: Cognitive aging and the adaptive selection of decision strategies. Psychology and Aging, 22(4), 796-810.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/julieivens/491354101/sizes/m/

ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for symposia, oral presentations, and posters on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required.

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM
SJDM’s annual conference will be held at the Chicago Hilton in Chicago, IL during November 15-17, 2008. Early registration and welcome reception will take place the evening of Friday, November 14. Following the format established in the last few years, the schedule includes a full day on Saturday to make room for more presentations and for two keynote speakers.

SUBMISSIONS
The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2008. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://sql.sjdm.org. Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster, Alan Schwartz, at www at sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, (also) Alan Schwartz, at alansz at uic.edu.

ELIGIBILITY
At least one author of each presentation must be a member of SJDM. Joining at the time of submission will satisfy this requirement. A membership form may be downloaded from the SJDM website at http://www.sjdm.org. An individual may give only one talk (podium presentation) and present only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters.

AWARDS
The Best Student Poster Award is given for the best poster presentation whose first author is a student member of SJDM.

The Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award is intended to encourage outstanding work by new researchers. Applications are due July 1, 2008. Further details are available at http://www.sjdm.org.

The Jane Beattie Memorial Fund subsidizes travel to North America for a foreign scholar in pursuits related to judgment and decision research, including attendance at the annual SJDM
meeting. Information and an application form can be found at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/joshua.klayman/more/BeattieInfo07.htm.

Applications are due by July 16, 2008.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Alan Schwartz (Chair), George Wu, Melissa Finucane, Craig McKenzie, Yuval Rottenstreich, Michel Regenwetter, Gal Zauberman, Michael Birnbaum (SJDM president), Julie Downs (Conference Coordinator)

(*) Decision Science News believes deeply in the city of Chicago

WELL-PAID POSTDOC AT DUKE’S FUQUA SCHOOL

Many great JDMers such as Luce, Bettman, Soll, Larrick, Ariely, Payne, Clemen, Fitzsimons can be found at Duke. Now, so can a lucky postdoc.

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business invites applications for a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the area of Behavioral Decision Making. The postdoctoral fellow will work with Dr. John Payne, Dr. Jim Bettman and Dr. Mary Frances Luce on work related to the impact of emotion on decision making. Planned projects include experimental laboratory research addressing the interaction of different forms and sources of emotion with features of decision task environments.

Opportunities will exist to apply this research within medical and financial domains, depending in part on the interests of the applicant. Applicants should have training in experimental construction, design, and analysis as well as a high-quality, ongoing research stream. The position will provide opportunities to interact with faculty across the business school and allied departments at Duke University. No teaching is required. Salary amount is $50,000; in addition, the post doc will have access to health, dental and retirement benefits. Candidates should submit a CV and selected papers, as well as statements of teaching and research interests, and they should arrange for three letters of recommendation to be sent. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled.

Candidates are encouraged to have all materials submitted prior to July 1, 2008 to ensure full consideration. If interested, please email CV to mluce at duke.edu.

DECISION MAKING AND PLANNING UNDER LOW LEVELS OF PREDICTABILITY

The International Journal of Forecasting invites you to submit a paper for a special issue on how to make decisions and plan (or formulate strategies) when our ability to forecast is low, or in some cases nonexistent.

During the last several decades it has become increasingly clear that there are a wide range of events that we cannot predict accurately or reliably. For instance, we now know that the forecasts of experts are not usually more accurate than those of simple models, which in turn are at least as accurate as the most statistically sophisticated ones in many cases. We also know that professional investors do not seem to performbetter than making a random selection of stocks or bonds, and that past performance is not a good indication of future performance. The consequences of this for managing risk are severe. For instance, none of the consequential bank lending crises of the past decades, including the events in 1982 (Latin American lending), 1989–91 (real estate and savings and loans), 1997 (Asian contagion), and 2007 (subprime) were predicted even a couple of months in advance. These failures raise a lot of questions about the role and usefulness of forecasting. Finally, while uncertainty cannot be measured by standard methods that assume that errors are thin-tailed (normally distributed), independent of one another and constant, more sophisticated methods do not seem to produce more reliable results. This raises the question of what we can do practically to face future uncertainty realistically and rationally, and how we should manage our risks.

The editors are soliciting a broad range of papers covering all areas of social science (as well as some outside) including judgmental decision making, finance, business, government, medicine, risk management, and even earthquakes, floods and climate change; in fact, any area where our ability to forecast is limited while the resulting uncertainty is huge.

The critical question that this special issue aims to address is what we can do if we accept the serious limits of predictability in many situations and the huge uncertainty surrounding our future decisions and plans. It is therefore critical to consider and provide practical solutions for how we can live with such uncertainty without either being paralyzed by hesitation, or falling victims of the illusion of control by wrongly believing that we are able to forecast and pretending that uncertainty does not exist.

All contributions will be refereed and maintained at the usual IJF standards. Please refer to the guidelines for preparing papers for submission at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/call.pdf

The deadline for first submissions is June 2008. Please contact one of the editors for inquiries concerning the suitability of a proposed paper. Special issue editors Spyros Makridakis INSEAD, France E-mail address: Spyros.Makridakis at gmail.com. Nassim Nicholas Taleb London Business School, UK E-mail address: nnt at theblackswan.org

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fire_brace/7257910/

7TH MAX PLANCK SUMMER INSTITUTE ON BOUNDED RATIONALITY

ANNOUNCEMENT
The 7th Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Psychology and Economics will
introduce graduate students and early career researchers from different disciplines to the
study of bounded and ecological rationality. This novel approach to human decision making
examines the simple processes and cognitive mechanisms that enable good decision
making in specific environments. This perspective has seen rapid theoretical development
over the last decade with psychologists and economists taking the lead in showing how the
study of bounded rationality can provide a greater understanding of the human mind and
adaptive decision making.

Classical theories of decision making are largely based on a vision of rationality that is
unrealistic. For example, “rational” humans are often imagined to be equipped with
unlimited knowledge, time, and information-processing power. In contrast, to understand
the way that people with limited resources actually make good decisions in everyday social
and economic tasks, bounded rationality (which should not be confused with optimization
under constraints or the heuristics and biases program) starts with a more psychologically
plausible perspective: Humans are able to make good decisions by using simple heuristic
processes that are adapted to particular task environments (i.e. ecological rationality).

AIM
The main objective of the Summer Institute is to introduce students from various fields to
the study of bounded rationality. This year our specific focus will be on ecological
rationality. The first goal will be to provide an overview of the main research areas in
which ecological rationality has been studied. This will include an introduction to the
specific research methods used through participation in experiments, observations, and
simulations. As well, participants and faculty will discuss several key findings from
economics and psychology. To insure active involvement of all participants, lectures will be
balanced with small group workshops. As a second goal, the Summer Institute will also
give participants the opportunity to present their own research in a poster session, in order
to facilitate feedback, discussion and future research development.

BOARD
The interdisciplinary Summer Institute is directed by Gerd Gigerenzer (Max-Planck-
Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany). This year’s keynote speaker will be
Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. Other faculty will include members of the organizing
institute, as well as several invited international speakers from a variety of disciplines.

APPLICATION
To ensure an excellent learning environment participation in the summer school is limited
to approximately 35 talented graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the
world. The summer institute provides stipends to all participants to cover part of their
expenses for travel and accommodation. Precise information on the stipends will be
announced to the applicants at a later point in time. Interested students should apply by
April 7, 2008 with a brief application letter, CV, and one short letter of recommendation,
preferably sent by email.

CONTACT
For more details on the Summer Institute and the application process, please visit our
website: www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/summerinstitute

JOBS IN THE UK AT DECTECH AND OXFORD

DECISION TECHNOLOGY

Decision Technology is a commercial decision research spin-out, based in central London, co-founded by Nick Chater and Henry Stott. We work internationally, mainly advising large corporations on consumer decision making. We are currently hiring several analysts, ideally with a mix of very strong academic background and ability, combined with enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced commercial environment, with potentially rapid career development.

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/LS576/PhD_and_Graduate_Recruiting/

We also have one post dedicated to research on football (soccer) prediction, in collaboration with The Times newspaper.

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/LS575/Football_Research_Position/

If you are interested, please contact Dr Ian Graham i.graham at dectech.org

NUFFIELD COLLEGE – UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Five-Year Research Fellowship in Experimental Social Sciences Nuffield College intends to appoint, with effect from 1st September 2008, a Research Fellow in Experimental Social Science (RFESS).

Applications are invited from post-doctoral researchers of any country wishing to undertake research in any area of experimental social sciences. The main interests of the College are in Economics, Politics and Sociology, but these are broadly construed to include, for example, social science approaches to history, social and medical statistics, international relations, social psychology, public policy, and social policy.

The College has recently begun an initiative in Experimental Social Science that includes a 20 station experimental lab that is dedicated to experimental research by scholars and students at Oxford University. It also includes a regular seminar on Experimental Social Science that highlights the research of leading experimental social scientists. The RFESS will be expected to play an active role in promoting the development of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Science. The RFESS’s main responsibility is to engage in independent scholarly research and to promote the development of experimental social science in the College. He or she will have no teaching or administrative obligations but will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of the College. This will include contributing to interdisciplinary exchanges that build on Experimental Social Science. The RFESS will be expected to organize, periodically, seminars or workshops in the area of experimental social science over the course of the five-year term of their appointment and the College can help finance and organize these activities.

• Research Fellow salary scale points 12-19: £31,625-£41,348.
• Free lunch and dinner in College (Common Table)
• Membership of the Senior Common Room

The Fellowship is intended for scholars from any country, who have completed a doctoral thesis and who are in the early years of an active research career. The Fellowship is equivalent to an Assistant Professorship in terms of academic standing, but it carries no teaching obligations. The Fellowship would normally be taken up on 1st September 2008. The appointment will be for up to 5 years.

Further particulars and an application form can be obtained from the College web
page: http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk or from the Administrative Officer, Nuffield
College, Oxford OX1 1NF. Email: justine.crump at nuffield.ox.ac.uk. Applications must be received by Friday, 4 April 2008.