The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (McGraw-Hill Series in Social Psychology)

You can view the test as a very entertaining IQ test from hell. The questions seem often simple. But, they are not. Other times, they are obviously difficult. I got a bit more than half of them correct. This was mainly because I had some knowledge or experience regarding certain traps the questions presented. I had made the mistake before. So, I learned from that. When I did not have any prior knowledge of a question, my results were very human, meaning not that good. But, learning the correct answer was both fun and educating.

The author touches on several fascinating probability and statistic concepts. One of them being the Bayes theorem, which suggests that medical screen test can be highly unreliable despite being touted as 80% to 90% accurate. In other words, you better understand the Bayes theorem better than the medical specialists who screen you for various diseases. Because, based on the author's study, doctors don't have a clue. Another chapter had an excellent discussion on correlation vs. causation. This includes some tricky nuances that many analysts in the financial industry trip upon. Another interesting probability concept is why it takes only 23 people in a room to have greater than a 50% that two of them share the same birthday. This seems impossible, but it is true.

The book has obviously a lot more than I am letting on here. I am not going to ruin it for you. It is really fun, educating, and interesting to read. You will also learn a whole lot about how you think, how others think, and how people think in groups. You will also understand how tricky it is to ask truly open and objective questions. Also, polls that seem objective are not due to the subjective structure of the question. I think you will enjoy this book, and I strongly recommend it.


Introductory and readable summary on this topic   April 24, 2003
76 out of 84 found this review helpful

This is my first book on psychology for self-study. As the author puts in the preface, "the focus is on experimental findings rather than psychological theory, surprising conclusions rather than intuitions, and descriptive prose rather than mathematics."

The author tends to use nuclear weapon, war, and clinical examples more often than other topics in order to illustrate concepts. The examples are taken from actual empirical researches, including laboratory ones. Due to the purpose of the textbook, the examples are used to explain concepts, rather than to show how an experiment is designed or how "good" the experiment is in the sense of cause and effect. The bibliography list is correspondingly large given only some 260 pages. The author does not forget to provide tips on how to avoid particular biases presented in a given chapter. No exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, but a special section READER SURVEY given after preface asks you to answer 39 questions to be used in the main part of the text. No glossary is provided.

As I read through, I have warned myself not to generalize research results presented to be directly applicable to my life without careful thoughts. From my naïve point of view and based only on materials presented in the book, these research findings may be internally valid, but never guaranteed to work in any other circumstances or contexts. Such context dependence is treated explicitly in Chapter 4, but it all applies to any other concepts discussed throughout the book. The author warns this point to readers at the end of the book in Appendix. My suggestion for the next revision would be to include informal yet usable introduction on how to design an experiment that anyone could conduct without specialized devices or environment, so that readers can test biases that may be present in their own contexts.

As an example, having been an Amazon customer for a while, I see more votes on "yes" for reviews 4 and 5 stars than those on "no" for reviews 3 and below. The page is designed such that unaware people see most helpful review first, then most recent review in decreasing order by default. Your impression toward a book may change if you sort reviews by least helpful first or lowest rating first. Biases may be present in your purchase decision making processes. If you are curious about knowing some characterizations and explanations for them, this book may be for you.


Entertaining, educational and effective   April 14, 2000
Joseph J. Kranz
38 out of 43 found this review helpful

Scott Plous creates an effective learning experience by entrapping you into revealing your own personal psychology of decision-making...if only to yourself. It is an extremely entertaining and educational method that holds you from the first page to the last. Whether you're an academic interested in a useful textbook tool or a lay person, manager or other professional reliant on decision-making, you'll enjoy and appreciate this book.


A lot of materials in this Great Book   July 5, 2005
T SANTOSO (Surabaya, Jatim Indonesia)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful

This is a very dense book, relatively easy to read, and very2 helpful. I love Blink and The Tipping Point, but this book probably has much much more materials, arguably more than 5 times of inside that those two best sellers combined.

I am very interested in the popular psycology stuffs, and Influence by Cialdini is my fav. So this book in some way give you the same chockful of surprises and new insight that will change the way you think.

I came across recomended by a University of Chicago MBA -email friend- who has much similar books favourites and he recomended this highly, and i absolutely agree and i would be glad to recommend this to anyone interested in human behaviour and psychology of bias.

MBA students should read this one and surely will enjoy this. I always draw, marks and put notes on my book and i think i end up marking so much of the materials.

Section one: Perception, Memory and Context
Section two: How Questions affect answers
Section three: Model of Decision making
Section Four: Heurictis and Biases.
Section five: The Social side of judgment and decision making
Section six: Common traps.

Some will complain that this book derived from a lot of previous psychological research, i agree, so for the psychology veteran out there, this might not the right book for you, but for most of us, this book will enlight, entertain and amuse us all...


Changes the way you think about everything   May 18, 2003
24 out of 28 found this review helpful

Simply put, this is one of those books that changes they way you think. It's one of those things that once you learn it, you wonder how you could've possibly gotten along in life without knowing it.

In a certain sense, I found this book disappointing. Disappointing, because after reading it, I excitedly searched for more information on the subject, but was unable to find another text nearly as accessible or informative in so few pages. Incredible.

Nevermind psychology, anyone interested in any form of political science or economics will find that this book opens a lot of philosophical doors they didn't know were there before, and changes the way they look at old problems or current rhetoric. An excellent intro to behavioral economics.