What people want from their professionals: attitudes toward decision-making strategies

Citation

(2013), "What people want from their professionals: attitudes toward decision-making strategies", Strategic Direction, Vol. 29 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sd.2013.05629daa.011

What people want from their professionals: attitudes toward decision-making strategies

Article Type: Abstracts From: Strategic Direction, Volume 29, Issue 4

Eastwood J., Snook B. and Luther K. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, December 2012, Vol. 25 No. 5, Start page: 458, Pages: 11

Attitudes toward four types of decision-making strategies – clinical/fully rational, clinical/heuristic, actuarial/fully rational, and actuarial/heuristic – were examined across three studies. In study 1, undergraduate students were split randomly between legal and medical decision-making scenarios and asked to rate each strategy in terms of the following: (i) preference; (ii) accuracy; (iii) fairness; (iv) ethicalness; and (v) its perceived similarity to the strategies used by actual legal and medical professionals to make decisions. Studies 2 and 3 extended study 1 by using a more relevant scenario and a community sample, respectively. Across the three studies, the clinical/fully rational strategy tended to be rated the highest across all attitudinal judgments, whereas the actuarial/heuristic strategy tended to receive the lowest ratings. Considering the two strategy-differentiating factors separately, clinically based strategies tended to be rated higher than actuarially based strategies, and fully rational strategies were always rated higher than heuristic-based strategies. The potential implications of the results for professionals’ and those affected by their decisions are discussed. Article type: Research paper ISSN: 0894-3257 Reference: 41AY705

Keywords: Actuarial, Attitudes, Clinical, Decision making, Full rationality, Heuristics