week 1

Unfortunately I missed the first lecture as I had to go back home due to personal reasons (my home town in Kosovo). However I have read chapters 1 and 2 of the JDMPP book and it gave me a general insight as to what judgment and decision making constitutes and I particularly enjoyed reading the first chapter that focused on what rationality is .Regarding the second chapter, I was particularly interested in the social judgment theory as it takes into consideration multiple factors and their importance in terms of relevance regarding an outcome of some event. I found it very interesting how math language can be used to predict the outcomes of events when of course some of the cues are known as well as their value. Another point worth mentioning was the reason as to why humans are less accurate in making judgments as opposed to the proposed statistical models. Due to the fact that humans tend to be more subjective when weighting out different factors and information regarding their values and outcomes, many inconsistencies can arise. Situational factors affect the overall outcomes of event as well due to the lack of individuals to control them as well as maybe the inability to realize how situational factors affect their behaviour. This theory in overall doesn’t explain much the cognitive processes as to why and how people reach a judgment, however other model known as the Probabilistic mental model provides an explanation as to why individuals might be inaccurate in their judgments. It suggests that individuals tend to base their judgments taking into consideration one cue (as opposed to the regression analysis approach, where multiple cues are taken into account) meaning that they use shortcuts in order to produce an outcome. The validity of such judgments can be questionable as the basis used for such judgments are not strong enough.
I have to admit that this module is a bit different from others; however that is what makes it more interesting I guess... I find the content of the book very interesting and I already started reading other chapters, I jumped in the 15 chapter as the title sound very captivating.