2 lectures: Intuition and Well being

• Lecture 1: This does not account for very much of what people really actually do in decision-making. People use a lot of heuristics in judgments and decision-making tasks. He won the nobel prize in economics. He talked about having debates with economists and debates with psychologsts. With Economists, he wonders how accurate is the normative approach? He is asking to what extent may intuition be truly marvelous? Ex. A firefigther who can tell who things are going to explode, or nurses who say that people have to get to the ER right before they have a heart attack? But there are other times when people’s performances become really flawed.
• Expected Utility theory : main ideas
• completeness 
• We know our preferences so we act in accordance with our preferences.
• Is intuition marvelous or is it flawed? Ex. firefighters or nurses (marvels of intuition).
• Are these feats of conscious reflective judgement?
• He is arguing that they are not, they are probably not on the bases of a conscious reflective process.
• How well can people make predictions about:
• wine quality: you could do, but most people don’t
• value of an art work: could do, but most people don’t
• stock market
• relative success of different students going to professional school or graduate school
• outcomes of judicial proceedings
• economic and political outcomes
• People usually don’t do well at all… an irritate. Major finding: in complex decisions, people and experts are routinely outperformed by simple equations.
• Ex. House of cards: professionals tend to rely on their own opinions, but a lot of it turns out to be wrong.
• For outcomes of judicial proceedings: an equation based on the judge’s behavior did better than the judge himself!
• Our ability to generate predictions is really limited, more than we think it is. They insist that they are experts in ways that they are not.
• These are the flaws in intuition.
• 2 ways that thoughts come to mind: what are those two ways?
• Reason (deliberative process) ((system 2))
• Intuition (automatic process) ((system 1))
• major differences between the two: a speed difference. Intuition is fast, reasoning is slower. Intuition  is automatic, reason is controlled, intuition is effortless, reasoning is effortful. One is learned slowly (intuition), and one is more flexible (reasoning). 
• Intuition is gained over time, but not at a conscious level. 
• What are natural assessments?
• natural assessments are: judgements that we very naturally do, almost automatically without reflecting. On the basis of perceived similarity or familiarity or whether or not its surprising, or the emotional aspect.
• used perceptual illustrations as examples. They are similar to what is happening generally in cognition.
• A couple of towers with child’s building blocks, and an array of blocks on the table
• the two towers looks similar
• but the array on the table looks different, but we realize that they both have the same number of blocks.
• Perceptual popout: some things just leap off the page. 
• Behaviors can start out as system 2 (reasoning) and then become system 1 (intuition). 
• Monitoring of intuitive processes:  How tightly do we check on ourselves and monitor?
• Not so much. It is a rather loose monitoring.
• So what can cause our intuition to fail?
• occupying the working memory or a cognitive load. Ex. stereotype threat.
• We might make a mistake using our intuitive system but we wouldn’t notice it, because we don’t monitor that closely, especially if we are preoccupied.
• What is the role of associations in intuitions?:
• ex. the word vomit. There are a whole series of responses that occur, ex. a flash of disgust on your face or a change in heart rate.
• These are quick responses that presumably over time experience with the word and the things that go with it have become linked… they are associated.
• This then provides an evaluation and provides a basis for an immediate response.
• Associative coherence is important underlying the intuitive response
• These are the basis of a judgment such as looking at a person and saying, are they likely to be a wallstreet banker? You could probably assign a probability to that without knowing exactly why. This is an example of representativeness… matching up our experience to these judgments.
• These judgments can lead to some silly errors too
• How do we become experts, and then capable of great intuition?
• Practice/repetition. 10,000 hours of practice or something, in a variety of different domains.
• Not only practice but also feedback. Immediate unambiguous feedback that tells you that what you did was correct or not. 
• Sometimes people can’t get this kind of feed back, so they can’t become experts, like predicting the stock market, or being an “experienced” clinician who may not have learned what they think they know.
• So how do these associations make us subject to failures of rationality?
• various aspects of associations make us subject to these failures:
• framing effects: the way the facts are presented, showing losses vs. gains, and we have an exaggerated reaction to losses. 
• It’s a failure of our monitoring.
• Discounts vs. surcharges: can portray the same situation as though its good or bad… if you give a comparison price that looks like you’re getting a discount, you’re more likely to buy it and makes us subject to silly decisions.
• You can give a bogus alternative that leads them to a different choice.
• Dan Ariely
• Predictably Irrational
• Your choice depended on your phone number, so if you’re given a stating point, you may find it very difficult to forget that.
• Why in places where driver’s liscence are not automatically donors do they have less donors?
• people just agree with the defaults when they don’t know what else to do.
• He said we are asked complex questions and to response, you answer a simpler question where you can use a short cut, in doing so, we use a heuristic. Perhaps this is not reliable at all
• So intuition can be marvelous in certain situations, but without unambiguous immediate feedback about the quality of your judgment, you may make really bad judgments. 
• Various affective biases play a big role. The classic decision making model shows that we weigh the pros and cons, etc, but in reality, we use shortcuts, etc. 

Lecture 2: wellbeing

• How is wellbeing related to decision-making?
• Decisions that people make to achieve their well being often make it worse.
• People know what they want and what they like, but we can’t really measure subjective wellbeing.
• How has happiness changed as the gross domestic product has gone up?
• It has deceased a bit, and yet people think that more things will make them happy
• How does life satisfaction change before and after marriage?
• It increases before marriage and decreases after marriage. 
• He finds a very sharp contrast between what people say in the moment and what they say after the fact. A well demonstrated phenomena
• The big issue he is raising here is: why are we surprised by these findings? Its as though we don’t have a very good grasp on our feelings or emotions, or not knowing what we will feel in the future, and not knowing what we have felt in the past.
• Bill James:
• figure in baseball (where they take a lot of data on sports in order to see what works, etc) who applies statistics to baseball and has careful attention to equations and deicision making, etc. Not based in intuition
• Major issue: why does this seem surprising to us?
• What do people say about the mood of paraplegics? A month later vs. a year later?
• The people who knew a paraplegic would say that they wouldn’t have so bad of a mood after a year, but someone who doesn’t know a one thought their mood wouldn’t change at all.
• What would people say about mood and winning the lottery?
• but if you know someone who had actually done it, you would predict after the initial mood that their happiness would drop back to normal.
• Having a high household income or being a woman over fourty?
• How well do people predict that they will like eating ice cream after eating it for 8 days straight? They don’t predict their liking any better than a stranger could.
• What determines how much one suffers in a painful situation?
• They thought the duration of the pain was the important factor, but really what is most important is when it was worst and what it was like at the end. 
• Like the cold arm test – people would rather have the long one than the short in the end, because it was more gradual.
• So! there is quite a difference between living an experience and remembering one or thinking about it.
• There is an experiencing self (living the experience) and the evaluating self, but it seems we only keep the evaluating self because we are remembering. 
• Its hard to know which one is more important of if they both are… but what we remember at the end and what we report feeling at the time seem to not at all be the same thing. 
• .4 is the correlation between moment to moment happiness and life satisfaction.
• Time seems to be a major factor for the experience self…
• So what are you thinking about for each?
• they don’t think so much about their experiences how great it is during the fact! Maybe sometime… but it’s a matter of attention. WE are attending to different things in the experiencing self vs. the evaluating self.
• The quality of the experiencing life is having a good time with our friends, and not  a lot of attention toward climate, etc… “
• “nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does when you’re thinking about it.”
• The evaluating self greatly exaggerates things. 
• The focusing illusion: the idea of directing your attention to certain aspects of the situation and thinking that those are really the important aspects for a decision. 
• We tend to direct our attention to just certain aspects.
• ex. having a nice salary and having a nice car would make you happy, but here we are just focusing on a limited number of aspects that don’t necessarily relate to your wellbeing.
• How much pleasure do you get from your car? It turns out to correlate with the bluebook value of the car. 
• How much did you enjoy your commute this morning? Then there is no correlation with the blue book value of the book at all! The bulk of the everyday experience with their car doesn’t seem to relate to their enjoyment of the car.
• So, he has many examples that our feelings and the feelings that we imagine that we would have are not at all the same. We are very poor predictors of our feelings, and we remember our past feelings very differenetly than we would have reported them at the time.
• So how does this relate to decision making?
• These are all issues that were dismissed in classical decision making theory, they  thought we knew what we wanted and liked and those preferences would be evident in our choices… but here we see that we are often of two minds not knowing what exactly we would want. 
• Its interesting to see this much literature on emotion and decision making… 20 years ago it would not have existed so much.