That's it!

We have now reached the end of the course, and the final deadline for our blogs and end of semester written course work is here. To sum up the module and its assesments I would firstly like to admit that I have been proved wrong. When first reading through the module guide for this course I was under the impression that old fashioned essays and traditional exams are much more valid in order to judge ones abilities rather than blogs and web pages. I was also a little worried about my computer knowledge, or lack of it rather, and because of that I did not think I would be able to keep up with my colleagues in those kind of assesments. I was lucky enough to end up in a hard working group though, which I have truly enjoyed swapping thoughts and working with. I have also through my colleagues learnt a thing or two about computer related things that I did not know before.

The blog have been very helpful as well, and I was surprised when I saw that I had a few comments to my posts which were not made by Dr Hardman. Especially when I saw the two posts written in Chinese/Japanese! Would also like to mention here that I would have replied to those, if it was not for the fact that I do not know Chinese/Japanese!

Apart from that I would just like to say thank you for reading my blog and hope you enjoyed it!

End of Semester Written Work.

My group is now in the middle of putting together our end of semester written course work which is, like our presentation was, dedicated to inequality aversion in animals. The articles which we are covering are fairly straight forward and very interesting. I was at first worried that we were going to be asked to base our coursework on articles which were using calculations with numbers in order to explain their findings, but it is instead articles written in words, which I find a lot more fun. I am also an animal lover, so I find the subject interesting on another level as well as on a psychological one. I have finished a suggestion for our introduction, but I am now stuck with the same problem as I have been before on this module: The writing of course works, the preparation of presentations and the researching of topics = not a problem at all. How ever, what I do have a problem with, is getting my work up on our wiki pages, our slides, or even (at first) this blog!

My knowledge about technology, or anything to do with computers to be more precise, is so poor that I have struggled a bit at times taking this module. Luckily, my colleagues in my group have been happy to meet up with me to show me how it is done. For now, I have e-mailed my colleagues a suggestion for an introduction to our piece for them to read through and give me some feed back on. Since it is three days left until our deadline today I am not at all worried, but I do think that if I had known a bit more about how those things work, I could have been getting a bit more involved in lay outs of our projects. But having said that, since it is a psychology module after all, I am hoping that the written work is far more important than visual presentations.

Presentations.

The final two weeks of our teaching in this module were dedicated to presentations. Performing them as well as observing them. I have learnt a lot from doing both. My group was the first one to go, which I was pleased about since that meant being able to watch the others and actually being able to pay attention while doing so instead of nervously going through my own piece in my head repeatedly. The first challenge we came across as a group was the extended length of our presentation. After timing ourself a number of times when rehearsing, we realised we needed to leave out some of our material. And even after doing so, we still went over the allocated time by about four minutes. I would have liked the room in which we had our presentations to have a clock on the wall which you could keep an eye one as a reminder of how quickly the minutes do pass in that situation. I also think that it would have helped to get started on looking up, out in the room, and at the audience. I was very nervous but I found that my colleagues listening to my groups presentation were very helpful simply by showing up and listening actively. The way this presentation differed to the other more informal ones was that everyone listening seemed to be doing so more actively which made it more fun I thought. Also, another point about extending the 10 minutes which was the set limit for our presentations is that since most of the other groups talks were a lot longer than ours, it made our presentation seem short and not as detailed as the others. Again, I think a clock possibly would have prevented that.

Inequity Aversion.

The mid semester course work has hit its deadline, and my group are now starting to look at the end of semester course work and the presentation we are having as part of the work. We are yet to find out which one of the five given articles we are basing our presentation on, and once we know, we have decided to meet up and have a go at making the Power Point slides together. My group was given the option to base our piece on Inequity Aversion instead of the topic of group decision making in animals. This subject still concerns animals, but can also be applied to human decision making.

Slowly but Surely.

My group, Group 2, are now close to finishing off our mid - semester written coursework, which we chose to base on the subject of Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way. In order to write our piece we have worked on some parts individually, we have met up in the computer room at University, kept in contact via e-mails and texts and we have also communicated via the wiki page that we have set up for our project. The biggest challenge we have come across so far was the actual making of the wiki page. Well, the making of it was fairly easy. The challenge was giving all of us access to it! I am not very good with computers, but need a bit of time to work out difficulties I might come across. Mix that with a bit of a short temper, and I am ready to throw in the towel. Thankfully, together with my colleagues, we all managed to log on and edit our page in the end. It is very good to have a mid - semester task that can prepare you a little for the final project. Group projects are great, as long as you end up in a good one which I have. My group is still working very well, with all five of us keeping in contact weekly both as we are working on this project and earlier when working on the weekly articles and presentations. It is another three days until our deadline, and then we can start focus on our final project which is going to be dedicated to Group Decision Making in Animals.

You can pop into our wiki page and have a look at our mid - semester course work at this address: https://sites.google.com/site/reasoningthefastandfrugalway/

Framing Effects.

The weekly readings for this course have so far been based on articles relevant to the subject of Judgement and Decision Making, articles which our groups prepare to at some point present in class. And I can tell you now: I do not like presentations. When it comes to learning, breaking down a text completely in order to present it confidently is a very effective way of getting knowledge. So far, so good. What I don't like is standing in front of a group of people and talk, it makes me very nervous. Not only when doing so, but generally also during the whole day of that event. But what I did find after my group presented our piece last week was that it is actually not that scary when you do it together, as a group. Still, not at all one of my favourite things to do, but looking back on reading the article and preparing it together the experience was quite enjoyable! The good thing about working together as a group is that the part/parts in the text that do not appear crystal clear (which does feature in a number of articles, I must admit!) can often better be explained to me by my group colleagues in order for me to get my head around it. This week we will complete our mid-semester written work, and I will reflect on this next week when it is completed.

Choices, Values and Frames.

People make decisions all the time and the topic of decision making is shared by disciplines like economics and political science as well as sociology and psychology to name a few. The questions addressed in the study of decisions are both normative (concerned with the logic and rationality in decision making) and descriptive (concerned with ones preferences and beliefs as they are). It is the tension between those two considerations that characterizes most of the studies of choice and judgement, and the analyses of the studies commonly distinguish riskless and risky choices. So, decision under risk is for example the acceptability of a gamble, and a riskless choice would be concerning the acceptability of service being exchanged for money.

Risky choices are made without advanced knowledge of eventual consequences, like wether or not to buy travel insurance when you go on holiday. Since the consequences in this scenario depends on uncertain events, the decision may be understood as an acceptance of a gamble that can give various outcomes. So, studies of decision making under risk has used simple gambles with financial outcomes and specified probabilities in order to reveal basic attitudes towards value and risk.

Kahneman and Tversky (1983) uses an approach to risky choice that developed from a psychophysical analysis of responses to money and probability. People are generally unwilling to risk, but more willing to risk in the case of increasing wealth.

In order to illustrate the phenomena of risk aversion, Kahneman and Tversky (1983) uses the choice between an 85 % chance o win $1000 (and therefore a 15 % chance of winning nothing) and the choice of receiving $800 for sure. Even though the gamble has higher mathematical expectation, a large majority of people (myself included!) prefer choosing the sure thing. The preference of the sure gain is an example of risk aversion. It is suggested that people do not judge probability by the expectation of their financial gain, but by the expectation of the feelings of these outcomes. The subjective value (ones feelings) is a weighted average, but now it is the subjective value of each outcome that is weighted by its probability. The subjective value (utility) is proposed as a concave function of money. In other words, the difference between the utilities of $200 and $100 is greater than the utility difference between $1200 and $1100.

It is usual in decision analysis to describe the outcomes in terms of total wealth. For example, tossing a fair coin is represented as a choice between current wealth and an even chance to double the current wealth or lose it. Only, people do not usually think of small outcomes in terms of wealth. Much more common is to rather view it in terms of neutral outcomes or gains or losses. If the subjective value is a change of wealth rather than an ultimate state of wealth, the psychophysical analysis of outcomes should be applied to losses and gains instead of total assets. This assumption plays a central role in the Prospect Theory. So, a loss is more unattractive than a gain is attractive.

The assumption of risk aversion has played a central part in economic theory. As the value of gains makes risk aversion, the value of losses makes risk seeking. In a situation where one is forced to choose between an 85 % chance to lose $1000 (and a 15 % chance to lose nothing) and a sure loss of $800 a large majority prefer to gamble. Risk seeking is, in other words, more likely in the gambling of a loss.