Psych 458 - Questions to ponder

4/16/99 - Arkes et al. 1988 & Dawes, 1994

1. What do hindsight and overconfidence have to do with each other?

2. What are the 8 different conditions subjects are assigned to in Arkes et al.?

3. How does asking for reasons for each of the possible diagnoses affect the hindsight bias? Why?

4. How is the presence or absence of the hindsight bias measured in Arkes et al.?

5. What possible response bias is there in Arkes et al.? How might this affect the results?

6. Besides simply being a Abias,@ how does the hindsight bias hurt physicians= ability to do a good job?

7. What relationship between accuracy and confidence was found in Wedding=s (1983) study (reported in Arkes et al.)?

8. What criteria does Dawes use for establishing Avalidity of knowledge?@ Why might a Agood story@ be of value in psychotherapy? (The answer to the latter question is not addressed in the article.)

9. Contrast clinical with actuarial judgments.

10. What are the two bases of actuarial judgment in psychology?

11. When therapists making clinical judgments have access to additional information not in actuarial equations (e.g., clinical interviews), are their judgments generally better than actuarial judgments? Is this the case in medical and business contexts? (Hint: the answer is found later in the chapter.)

12. When clinicians in Ann Arbor were confronted with Goldberg=s results, in what way did they show Aselective perception@ (discussed in Ch. 1 of Plous)?

13. What have been some of the objections to Dawes= general thesis? How does he refute them?

14. How might having a bias to believe we can predict better than we actually can help us?

15. What important role does Dawes see for experts in making predictions?