Module introduction: 9/10/09
This week was mainly for general introduction to the module. We were told about the module assessment criteria and how we were expected to achieve this. Dr Hardman introduced his book “Judgment and Decision Making”, which by the way will cover the entire module plus the journals that he will post each week on his website. As third year student I would say his module is not entirely new to me due to the fact that for last two years he has covered few topics on heuristics and probabilities.
The second part of the lecture we discussed the subject by asking few of my colleagues about the meaning of judgment and decision making, as expected many of us had different opinion on the topic. However, it was very interesting to learn that although many of our opinion seemed to differ they actually come down to the same meaning. Dr Hardman then posed a question of ‘what is a good judgment? According to him, in order to consider or make a good judgment you need to consider all different types of information. You need to find out all the relevant information about them and then integrate this. However, by having too much information this might obstruct your judgment due to the time frame. Decision analysis is basically taking big problem and breaking it down into smaller problems. I have learned that one earlier stage of decision making is the weighting of the problems, the values and once you got that you then X these different things. This kind of decision is mostly made in government and big companies. However, some people suggest that a good decision is not always made in analytical ways.
