xi This book is concerned with reasoning, judgment and decision
making. Reasoning is concerned with making inferences, judgment is about the formation of beliefs about the likelihood
of uncertain events, and decision making is about choosing between alternatives.
p.35 the more consistent problem solver is better able to represent
information accurately and stably. Hence, while one cause of success may be the presence of appropriate knowledge,
success may also depend upon appropriate levels of relevant general abilities... necessary for the optimal execution of a
strategy.
p.36 The best [strategies] are those that give consistent, precise answers with the minimum of effort
p.38 Considering issues of strategy discovery, the key events appear to
be the identification and deletion of redundant steps. These will enable inefficient but generally applicable strategies (whether
verbal or spatial) to be converted into task-specific short-cuts
p.41 people discover new methods and principles as a result of their successes...
creativity is hindered if the basics of a task have not been mastered
p.125 Few decision makers are prophets; most of us have to admit that our knowledge is incomplete
and our foresight limited. Hence, our claims and predictions have often to be qualified with expressions indicating
degrees of confidence or uncertainty. We use qualifiers such as "possibly", "perhaps", "most likely" and "almost certainly"
to express how much we believe in a given proposition, and phrases such as "uncertain", "doubtful", "unlikely", and "improbable"
to indicate how much we doubt it... the linguistic phrases have often been called "verbal probabilities".
p.150 Craik (1943) proposed that the human mind builds internal models of the external world in
order to anticipate events. This conjecture underlies an account of how individuals understand discourse and reason
from it (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991). The theory postulates that each mental model represents a possibility, and
that its structure and content capture what is common to the different ways in which the possibility might occur.
p.220 Scientific theorizing, visions of rationality and common wisdom alike appear to share a mutual belief:
the more information that is used and the more it is processed, the better (or more rational) the choice, judgment or decision
will be.
p.221 How would a rational agent make this decision [deciding which of two colleges is better]? Two commandments
that are often taken as characteristics of rational judgments are complete search and compensation (see Gigerenzer & Goldstein,
1999). The former prescribes, "thou shalt find all the information available", while the latter says, "thou
shalt combine all pieces of information" (that is, not rely on just one piece).
p. 223 To conclude, making good decisions need not rely on the standard rational approach of collecting
all available information and combining it according to the relative importance of each cue - simply betting on one good reason,
even one selected at random, can provide a competitive level of accuracy in a variety of environments... Limited processing
of limited information can also suffice to perform such taxing tasks as estimating a precise criterion value.
p.225 On an individual level, search for information in our environment occurs serially (ignoring the fact
that our different senses can search in a parallel fashion). Following this reasoning, it is possible that many human decision
heuristics were selected to achieve speed by seeking to use as little information from the environment as they could get away
with.
p.253 Strategic decisions are the basis on which organisations identify, clarify and act with respect to
their medium- and longer-term goals.
p.255 There is a large volume of evidence showing that individuals engage in heuristic processing
strategies during the course of strategic decision making... While heuristic processing renders the world
manageable (by reducing the information-processing requirements of the decision maker), it can on some occasions
lead to errors and bias, reducing the effectiveness of strategic decision making.
p.273 Most decisions in life are gambles... From the mundane choices rendered with scarcely
a moment's reflection to urgent decisions founded on careful deliberation, we seldom know in advance and with certainty
what the consequences of our choices will be. Thus, most decisions require not only an assessment of the attractiveness
of potential consequences, but also some appraisal of their likelihood of occurrence.
