The cues in the environment used by our decision maker have the properties
of being objective and accessible. This means that sometimes the cues are obtained only after some activity is performed.
p.43"Generally, cues [relevant pieces of evidence available or accessible in the
environment] vary in at least two ways. First, they vary in their objective validity. Second, they vary in the ease with which
they can be processed: Some are simply available; others are accessible at varying costs. By available we mean that they are
directly observable such as the skin color, sex, or behavior of a person; the brand or price of a product in the supermarket;
or the length of a persuasive message. By accessible, we mean that the judge must engage in some activity to sample the information
such as to observe a person's behavior in many situations, try out a product, read a consumer report about it, or read the
arguments contained in a persuasive message....
External Cues
In most situations that call for a judgment or a decision, multiple relevant pieces of evidence
are available or accessible in the environment. Generally, the type and number of relevant external cues for a judgmental
task at hand is determined by the ecology surrounding an individual and cannot be predicted by our model."
Here is one definition of intuition:
p.71"According to the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com), intuition is 'the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process.' In
general parlance, knowing something without knowing how you know it."
It seems that there are certain times when we can learn and make predictions about our environment
without any conscious awareness of the steps involved in the process.
p.76"The term implicit learning was coined by Reber (1989) to refer to the process by which people
acquire knowledge about rule-governed complexities of a stimulus environment independently of conscious attempts to do so.
Reber (1993) and Berry and Dienes (1993) have showed that people exposed to various artificial structured situations, without
being informed that there was any structure, were subsequently able to identify instances of the phenomenon or to predict
the future occurrences."
Just because we respond intuitively in certain situations doesn't mean we always acted this way.
Perhaps there was a time that we were aware of the steps involved, but repetition and familiarity pushed the actual awareness
of the steps into our subconscious mind.
p.94-95"The fact that many activities are exercised in an intuitive manner does not, of course,
mean that they were originally acquired in this way. This applies to many physical skills such as driving an automobile. Here
the skills (e.g., changing gears) are so practiced and overlearned that the person can no longer explain how they are achieved.
What started explicitly becomes automated - and thus intuitive - over time. This also applies to mental skills and bears on
the issue of how people acquire expertise in specific domains."
Here is Orasanu and Connolly's model of a decision making process. Note that identification
of constraints and the generation of possible solutions are steps in this process. Perhaps these steps could
make up the core of the decision making process in a computer chess program.
p.120-121"What exactly does making a decision entail? There are many phase models of decision making
in the literature... but we borrow the decision protocol of Orasanu and Connolly (1993) because it includes the execution
of decisions that is especially relevant when considering sports decisions... The first step is the presentation
of the problem... The next step is the identification of the constraints, resources, and goals facing the decision
maker... Third, the generation of possible solutions to the problem, or courses of action, occurs... The fourth step
of the decision-making protocol, consideration of possible solutions, is the one typically regarded as representing
the whole of the decision-making process... the next two stages are rarely dissociated from the output of the consideration
phase. Selection of a course of action... and initiation of the selected action... Finally, the last stage
of a decision protocol is the evaluation of the decision made including the appraisal of feedback information if
any exists."
Humans make use of simplifying heuristics when faced with complexity. These heuristics often achieve
acceptable results.
p.135"According to this program [the heuristics and biases program of Kahneman, Slovic,
& Tversky, 1982], when dealing with the twilight of uncertainty, people rely on a limited number of simplifying heuristics
rather than more formal and computationally and informationally more extensive algorithmic processing. The heuristics are
regarded as typically yielding accurate judgments but also give rise to systematic errors."
Perhaps we should not turn to grandmasters to describe how they choose a move in a game of chess,
precisely because the process for them has become so automated that it cannot be described in words.
p.191"In this chapter, we propose that expert intuition refers to processes to which the decision
maker does not have conscious access either because previously conscious, analytic processes have become automated to a point
in which conscious attention is no longer necessary (Goldberg, 2005) or as the result of cumulative, associative learning
that has never been conscious (e.g., Plessner, Betsch, Schallies, & Schwieren, chap. 7, this volume)."
Here again we see that constraints play a role in the decision making process.
p.195"The constrained optimization view of decision making depicts decision makers as seeking the
alternative that optimizes their objective function under a given set of constraints."
