Customer Reviews

The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (McGraw-Hill Series in Social Psychology)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
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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.

This is my first book on psychology for self-study. As the author puts in the preface, "the focus is on experimental findings rather than psychological theory, surprising conclusions rather than intuitions, and descriptive prose rather than mathematics."

The author tends to use nuclear weapon, war, and clinical examples more often than other topics in order to illustrate concepts. The examples are taken from actual empirical researches, including laboratory ones. Due to the purpose of the textbook, the examples are used to explain concepts, rather than to show how an experiment is designed or how "good" the experiment is in the sense of cause and effect. The bibliography list is correspondingly large given only some 260 pages. The author does not forget to provide tips on how to avoid particular biases presented in a given chapter. No exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, but a special section READER SURVEY given after preface asks you to answer 39 questions to be used in the main part of the text. No glossary is provided.

As I read through, I have warned myself not to generalize research results presented to be directly applicable to my life without careful thoughts. From my naïve point of view and based only on materials presented in the book, these research findings may be internally valid, but never guaranteed to work in any other circumstances or contexts. Such context dependence is treated explicitly in Chapter 4, but it all applies to any other concepts discussed throughout the book. The author warns this point to readers at the end of the book in Appendix. My suggestion for the next revision would be to include informal yet usable introduction on how to design an experiment that anyone could conduct without specialized devices or environment, so that readers can test biases that may be present in their own contexts.

As an example, having been an Amazon customer for a while, I see more votes on "yes" for reviews 4 and 5 stars than those on "no" for reviews 3 and below. The page is designed such that unaware people see most helpful review first, then most recent review in decreasing order by default. Your impression toward a book may change if you sort reviews by least helpful first or lowest rating first. Biases may be present in your purchase decision making processes. If you are curious about knowing some characterizations and explanations for them, this book may be for you.

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.

If you are interested in getting a glimpse into the way people make decisions under ambiguous, complex, or non-linear conditions, this book is a good place to start. I only gave it four stars, however, because it failed to leave me with a strong impression. Many experiments are covered, but there's little in the way of practical application or insight.

The book starts out with a 12 page reader survey, which I encourage you to skip. It took me an hour to complete, but didn't add anything to my grasp of the material. The author uses it to prevent hindsight bias, which I experienced vividly when telling my sister about one of the experiments covered in the book. "Of course," she said, like the whole concept was so obvious that the average idiot has already figured it out. That's hindsight bias.

Another interesting concept is attitude-behavior inconsistency. One example is the road trip a psychologist took with a Chinese couple in the 1930's when anti-Chinese sentiment was prevalent in the U.S. In the vast majority of cases the couple was treated quite well. After the trip, the psychologist anonymously contacted the places they had stayed at, and asked if Chinese people were accommodated. The vast majority of responses were, "No." Another example of attitude-behavior inconsistency given is when Seminary students on their way to give a speech on being a Good Samaritan ignored a person in an alley dressed as a bum who was coughing and moaning.

Another interesting concept was social loafing, which demonstrated that a person working in a threesome will expend 85% of the effort they would expend if working alone.

There were a few examples in the book, however, that seem to demonstrate a lack of understanding on the author's part. One was the experiment that demonstrated that doctors could be easily misled into diagnosing the odds of a tumor being malignant at 75% rather than the true probability of 7%. This is a fascinating result with practical implications, but this topic was not explored in detail, leaving me feeling quite unsatisfied. This is the second book that has handled this experiment superficially, unfortunately.

Another example was the chart showing weather forecasters versus doctors. The author commented that weather forecasters were more accurate than doctors in their predictions, contrary to popular opinion. In reality, the chart demonstrated that weather forecasters are much more aware of their limitations than are doctors, because they get immediate feedback regarding their predictive failures, and are therefore much less confident regarding their predictive abilities than are doctors who often do not receive such feedback.

The main takeaway I got from this book was that it is possible to make better decisions, if one listens to contrary opinions, and by empathizing with those who hold them. This exercise may not change your decision, but it will help minimize common biases and decision-making errors.

The author does a nice job at the end of letting readers know that even psychological researchers are prone to making many of the judgment errors discussed in the book. He also provides a list of books for further reading, including one of my favorites, How We Know What Ain't So by Gilovich. The Gilovich book is definitely my first recommendation for anyone just starting to explore this fascinating field.

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...

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.

I write this from the perspective of a social and market researcher, and thought I was quite aware of many of the nuances and pitfalls that can render our scientific research somewhat open to question. But Scott Plous, with his vivid, lively writing style, his acute logic and well chosen case studies shows what a hell of a minefield it is that we work in. The Psychology of Judgment and Decisionmaking is a rich resource book of human insight that is at once vitally useful (this book has opened me up to new insights and led me to rethink many aspects of research design) and awfully humbling: there's a pair of pie charts on Page 54 that show that whatever questions we may have about margins of error, the way we happen to phrase the question may well have a much larger effect.

In total, Plous entertains, he shares wise insights and he challenges the reader. I wish Amazon had room for 6 stars. I'd give this one 7.

Since human judgment and decision making is a huge research and application area, it is very hard to find a comprehensive introduction as "The Psychology of Judgment of and Decision Making". Plous' book is both comprehensive and readable; the examples and the problems in relevant chapters of the book helps the reader easily understand what is the structure and function of decision making, and how one can improve his /her judgment. Suitable both for professionals and lay auidance.

A decade ago Scott Plous produced a very readable summary of research in social psychology and (what is now known as) behavioral economics.
Our understanding of how people actually behave (as opposed to our theories as to how they should behave) has been immeasurably enriched by work dating (variously) from Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Stanley Milgram and many others.
Management education has yet to fully take into account the many insights coming from psychologists, experimental economists and others so nicely summarized in this book.

Scott Plous' book about the psychology of judgement and decision making is one of the best books covering this topic I ever read. Very easy to understand, comprehensive, but always on a high level. This book is not only interesting for beginners, but for experts even. No difficult scientists' language. I read it from the first to last page.