Decisions, Decisions

This topic submitted by Chris Wolfe (WolfeCR@muohio.edu) on 2/10/06. Additions were last made on Friday, February 10, 2006. Section: Wolfe

This is a great "problem space." Many researchers study rationality by comparing human performance to different models. You could give people a variety of judgment and decision making tasks and see if they perform better in groups vs individually. Think about the key comparisons. With groups, is the issue one of collaboration (working together vs. working alone) or is it one of social perception (responding annonmyously vs. publically). Other key issues are do people respond better when they receive incentives (cash, or in your case praise). Finally, are there different kinds of problems that people are more or less rational on under different circumstances (choices among probabilistic gambols vs. framing effects). Let the research questions and hypothes dictant your methodology.

One way to get more statistical power is to perform a within subjects experiment where each participant serves in each condition and acts as her or his own conrol group, counterbalancing for problem type. The above URL may be helpful.

Check out the URL: http://www.sjdm.org/.

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