We have now entered our fourth week into the third year Psychology module Judgement and Decision Making, and after one introduction session, one week of strike and one very enjoyable lecture dedicated to three articles, which were presented and discussed in groups, I am getting a bigger understanding of ways in which Judgement and Decision Making can be explained. This field of Psychology is not one in which I have great experience from, neither do I have a lot of experience of working together with other students as a group, but after studying the article Psychological Models of Professional Decision Making by Dhami (2001) with my four colleagues in my given group I also realised the profits of swapping ideas with and explaining your thoughts to a small number of students in a group and were surprised to find that it was very helpful and fun. The reading for this module is based on one main reference, which is the book Judgement and Decision Making by Dr. David Hardman, as well as a number of relevant articles. By also having access to our colleagues blogs we can leave each other comments and swap thoughts with each other this way, which is also a helpful way of working through this course. We are also being assessed through two pieces of collaboratively written work within our groups. This as well will be a new experience of writing coursework for me and I am looking forward to starting these projects with my new friends in my group.
As a joint Criminology and Psychology student I am so far finding this course to be very relevant to me. The first article my group was given to prepare a presentation of (the earlier mentioned Psychological Models of Professional Decision Making by Dhami) was based on testing the ability of the two models Franklin’s rule and Matching Heuristic in order to predict bail decisions made by judges in two different courts. Specific topics that our groups can choose to later pursue in each week of December include for example Moral Judgement and Terrorism and Perceived Risk, which both sounds very interesting to me since it is helpful to apply the information here in examples which relates to what I have previously studied in my Criminology modules.
The piece I am working on now is The Priority Heuristic: Making Choices Without Trade-Offs by Brandstätter, Gigerenzer and Hertwig (2006). This article, together with chapter 7 in Judgement and Decision Making is what our next lecture will be based on, and I will dedicate my next update to my reflections on this article.
