Psych 458 - Questions to ponder, 5/28/99
Lopes, 1991
1. Which articles about decision making get cited most, those about good performance or bad performance? In what way does this parallel the field of medicine? Which would you be most interested in reading about?
2. Looking back over the articles we have read in this class, does it seem that articles published later (say, from the late 1980's on) have as much of an emphasis on errors as the earlier articles do? Do you notice other differences over time in the field?
3. What did Kahneman and Tversky note as being one positive aspect of using heuristics?
4. In what ways did Kahneman and Tversky=s innovation to use Aproblems@ to study decision making improve the field? In what ways is it problematic?
5. How could you broaden the context for the problem about words with a particular letter in the first or third position and argue that subjects= answers about the letter Ar@ were really quite defensible?
6. In what ways have the problems in the Kahneman and Tversky tradition been Atuned?@
7. Lopes criticizes
Abiases@ researchers for focussing on outcome rather than process. Can the study of biases and heuristics teach us anything about process?