Comparative Decision Making

Edited by Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

There are many books on human decision making but none that take a comparative approach that includes the highly cognitive and emotional decisions made by humans in the area of aesthetics and culture, decisions made by nonhuman animals and plants, and decisions made by mathematical and computational entities.
The approach is hyper-interdisciplinary, reaching across traditional academic boundaries to create a new interdiscipline.

Comparative Decision Making

Edited by Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

Description

Decision making cuts across most areas of intellectual enquiry and academic endeavor. The classical view of individual human thinkers choosing among options remains important and instructive, but the contributors to this volume broaden this perspective to characterize the decision making behavior of groups, non-human organisms and even non-living objects and mathematical constructs. A diverse array of methods is brought to bear-mathematical, computational, subjective, neurobiological, evolutionary, and cultural. We can often identify best or optimal decisions and decision making processes, but observed responses may deviate markedly from these, to a large extent because the environment in which decisions must be made is constantly changing. Moreover, decision making can be highly constrained by institutions, natural and social context, and capabilities. Studies of the mechanisms underlying decisions by humans and other organisms are just beginning to gain traction and shape our thinking. Though decision making has fundamental similarities across the diverse array of entities considered to be making them, there are large differences of degree (if not kind) that relate to the question of human uniqueness. From this survey of views and approaches, we converge on a tentative agenda for accelerating development of a new field that includes advancing the dialog between the sciences and the humanities, developing a defensible classification scheme for decision making and decision makers, addressing the role of morality and justice, and moving advances into applications-the rapidly developing field of decision support.

Comparative Decision Making

Edited by Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

Chapter 2. Economic decisions and institutional boundaries
Evelyn Korn and Johannes Ziesecke

Commentary 2.1. Advocating for Homo economicus
Erwin Amann

Commentary 2.2. The Neoclassical Economics Model: Extensions and Limits
Jack Schieffer

Chapter 3. Why Making a Decision Involves More Than Decision-Making: Past, Present, and Future in Human Action
Bertram C. Bruce

Commentary 3.1. Punctuation, Continuity, and Historicity: Traversing the In-Between
Travis Whetsell and Patricia M. Shields

Commentary 3.2. Why we will never know if human decision making is unique
Evelyn Korn

Commentary 3.3. Forks in the Road from Decision to Action
Chris Higgins

Chapter 4. Environmental Decision Making in the Argentine Delta
Stephanie C. Kane

Commentary 4.1. Environmental Decision-Making,
Social Reality, and Port Cities as "Hot Spots"

Commentary 4.2. The Crevices of Unreason in Human Decision Making
Bertram C. Bruce

Chapter 5. The Social Nature of Human Decision Making
James D. Morrow

Commentary 5.1. The Social Nature of Human Decision Making: A Computational Perspective
Craig Boutilier

Commentary 5.2. When Should We Expect a Nash Equilibrium?
Barry O'Neill

Chapter 6: Ambiguous decisions in the human brain
Ifat Levy

Commentary 6.1 Ambiguous Decisions in the Human Brain
Ming Hsu and Lusha Zhu

Commentary 6.2 What Animals Can Tell Us About Human Choice Under Risk
Thomas R. Zentall

Chapter 7: What Can Neuroeconomics Tell Us About Economics (and Vice Versa)?
Mark Dean

Commentary 7.1. Disciplining behavioral theories through brain-based models of decision-making
Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo

Commentary 7.2 On the benefits of studying mechanisms underlying behavior
Andrew Sih, Andrew Bibian, Nick DiRienzo, XiuXiang Meng, Pierre-Oliver Montiglio and Kevin Ringelman

Chapter 8. Behavioral Approaches to Decision Making
Edmund Fantino and Stephanie Stolarz-Fantino

Commentary 8.1 Can Choice Be Suboptimal?
K. Geoffrey White

Commentary 8.2 How Studying Animals Can Clarify the Basis of Human Decision Making
Thomas Zentall

Chapter 9. A behavioral ecology view of decision making: something old, something borrowed, something new
Andrew Sih

Commentary 9.1 Crossovers in Ecological and Economic Models of Decisions
Jack Schieffer

Commentary 9.2 The Scientific Perspective and the Potential Emergence of a General Theory of Decision Making
David F. Westneat

Chapter 10. Using evolutionary thinking to cut across disciplines: the example of the argumentative theory of reasoning
Hugo Mercier

Commentary 10.1 Evolution and Development
David Moshman

Commentary 10.2 The Effectiveness of Classical Reasoning and the Provenance of Reasoning by Argumentation
Philip H. Crowley

Commentary 10.3 A new link in the Unification of the Sciences of Cognition
Alain Trognon and Martine Batt

Commentary 10.4: The Evolution of Argument: A Commentary on Mercier
David S. Chester, Richard S. Pond, Jr., and C. Nathan DeWall

Chapter 11. Poor Decisions About Security
Bruce Schneier and Deric Miller

Commentary 11.1: Poor Decisions about Security
Helen Pushkarskaya and Ifat Levy

Commentary 11.2: Human irrationality as a contributor financial and economic insecurity: Implications for policy-makers
Denis Hilton and Caroline Attia

Chapter 12. Increasing the Accuracy of Criminal Justice Decision-Making
Sarah A. Crowley and Peter J. Neufeld

Commentary 12.1. Roots of Wrongful Convictions
Brandon L. Garrett

Commentary 12.2. Driving forces for change
Rebecca E. Bucht

Chapter 13. Forensic Judgment and Decision-Making
Peter A. F. Fraser-Mackenzie, Rebecca E. Bucht, & Itiel E. Dror

Commentary 13.1 The Awkward Marriage of Criminal Justice and Science
Sarah Crowley

Commentary 13.2 In the Eye of the Beholder
Thomas R. Zentall

Chapter 14. Computational Decision Support: Regret-based Models for Optimization and Preference Elicitation
Craig Boutilier

Commentary 14.1. Group Decision Making on Combinatorial Domains
Jérôme Lang

Commentary 14.2. Putting Preferences into Computational Context
Judy Goldsmith

Commentary 14.3. Bottlenecks and Regret
Vincent Conitzer and Lirong Xia

Chapter 15. Improving public policy decisions in creating institutions and markets to transfer natural disaster risk in developing countries
Jerry R. Skees and Grant Cavanaugh

Commentary 15.1 Decision Making About Real Needs of Actual People
Helen Pushkarskya

Commentary 15.2 Designing Mechanisms to Overcome Market and Behavioral Failures
Jack Schieffer

Chapter 16. What the comparative approach to decision making has to offer
Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

Comparative Decision Making

Edited by Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

Author Information

Philip Crowley is an evolutionary ecologist who uses both theoretical and empirical methods to address a wide array of issues in natural systems. He is Professor of Biology at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught and conducted research since 1976. Professor Crowley has served as Director of Graduate Studies in Biology and as Director of the School of Biological Sciences; he received the university's William B. Sturgill Award for contributions to graduate education in 2012. In 1991-92 he was a Royal Society Scholar at the British NERC Centre for Population Biology in England and will be a INRA Scholar in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2013.

TZ: Professor of Psychology, University of KentuckyPC: Professor of EcolThomas Zentall is a comparative cognitive psychologist who studies the similarities and differences between the behavior of humans and other animals; both the cognitive behavior of other animals and the noncognitive behavior of humans. For example, social learning, concept learning, memory strategies, suboptimal gambling behavior, and the effect of effort on the value of the reward that follows.

Contributors:

Contributors

Erwin Amann
Department of Microeconomics
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Essen, Germany

Martine Batt
Lorraine University Research Group on Communication
Nancy, France

Andrew Bibian
Department of Environmental Science and Policy
University of California-Davis
Davis, CA

Craig Boutilier
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

Avi Brisman
School of Justice Studies
College of Justice and Safety
Eastern Kentucky University
Richmond, KY

Bertram C. Bruce
Department of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Champaign, IL

Isabelle Brocas
Department of Economics
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

Rebecca Bucht
Cognitive Consultants International
San Francisco, CA

Juan D. Carrillo
Department of Economics
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA

Grant Cavanaugh
Department of Agricultural Economics
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Vincent Conitzer
Department of Computer Science
Duke University
Durham, NC

Philip H. Crowley
Department of Biology and Center for Ecology, Evolution and Behavior
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Sarah A. Crowley
Gross Belsky Alonso LLP
San Francisco, CA 94104 USA

Mark Dean
Department of Economics
Brown University
Providence, RI

Nick DiRienzo
Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior
University of California-Davis
Davis CA

Itiel Dror
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
University College London
London, UK

Edmund Fantino
Department of Psychology
University of California-San Diego
La Jolla, CA

Peter Fraser-Mackenzie
Centre for Risk Research
University of Southampton
Southampton, UK

Brandon Garrett
School of Law
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Judy Goldsmith
Department of Computer Science
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Chris Higgins
Education Policy Organization and Leadership
377 Education Building
Champaign, IL

Denis Hilton
Department of Psychology
l'université de Toulouse-II le Mirail
Toulouse, France

Ming Hsu
Hass School of Business and Helen Wills Neuroscience Program
University of California
Berkeley CA

Stephanie C. Kane
Department of Criminal Justice
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN

Evelyn Korn
Abteilung Mikroökonomie
Philipps-Universität
Marburg Universitätsstraße
Marburg Germany

Jérôme Lang
LAMSADE
Université Paris-Dauphine
Paris, France

Ifat Levy
Comparative Medicine and Department of Neurobiology
School of Medicine
Yale University
New Haven, CT

XiuXiang Meng
College of Life and Environmental Sciences
Minzu University of China
Beijing, China

Hugo Mercier
Faculté des letters et sciences humaines
Cognitive Science Center
University of Neuchâtel
Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Deric Miller
Department of Biology
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Pierre-Olivier Montiglio
Département des Science Biologiques
Université du Québec à Montréal
Montréal, Canada

James Morrow
Department of Political Science
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI

David Moshman
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE

Peter Neufeld
Co-Director of the Innocence Project
New York, NY

Barry O'Neill
Department of Political Science
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA

Helen Pushkarskya
Comparative Medicine and Department of Neurobiology
School of Medicine
Yale University
New Haven, CT

Kevin Ringelman
Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology
University of California-Davis
Davis, CA

Jack Schieffer
Department of Agricultural Economics
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Bruce Schneier
Office of Security Technology
British Telecom
London, UK

Patricia M. Shields
Political Science Department
Texas State University-San Marcos
San Marcos, TX
Andrew Sih
Department of Environmental Science and Policy
University of California-Davis
Davis, CA

Jerry Skees
Department of Agricultural Economics
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Stephanie Stolarz-Fantino
Department of Psychology
University of California-San Diego
La Jolla, CA

Alain Trognon
Lorraine University
Research Group on Communication (InterPsy)
Nancy, France

David F. Westneat
Department of Biology and Center for Ecology, Evolution and Behavior
University of Kentucky
Lexington KY

Travis Whetsell
Political Science Department
Texas State University-San Marcos
San Marcos, TX

K. Geoffrey White
Department of Psychology
University of Otago
Dunedin, New Zealand

Lirong Xia
Center for Research on Computation and Society
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

Thomas R. Zentall
Department of Psychology
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY

Lusha Zhu
Hass School of Business and Helen Wills Neuroscience Program
University of California
Berkeley CA

Johannes Ziesecke
Abteilung Mikroökonomie
Philipps-Universität
Marburg Universitätsstraße
Marburg, Germany

Comparative Decision Making

Edited by Philip H. Crowley and Thomas R. Zentall

Reviews and Awards

"Overall, I think the editors and contributors are to be praised for their accomplishment and that one can benefit from reading the chapters in areas with which one is not familiar." --PsycCRITIQUES