Expected Utility Theory - Human Psychology - Lecture Slides, Slides of Psychology

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Expected Utility (EU) theory

• The Classic picture of human decision making
• The bulk of our vocational interventions are based on this model

Current picture of human decision makers

• Informed by evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and social psychology
• Amalgam of brain systems
  • Cobbled together
  • To adapt to evolving environmental demands

An Extremist Position:

• a. It doesn’t matter, because you don’t get to keep your decision anyway.
• b. We can’t help you choose rationally, because that’s not how people make choices
• c. Opportunity Costs: The matching model implies more control than you really have, and keeps you from doing that which you should really be doing (engaging).

Radical Argument 1:

• You don’t get to keep your decision anyway.
• Even if there was a time when matching did work, today’s world of work is so turbulent that we can no longer count on keeping our match.

Deciding is not an issue

-- when it's easy

• But, for our clients it's not easy

Consensus:

• Human decision making is juicy

What is it that controls human behavior?

“Our modern skulls house a

Stone Age mind” Cosmides & Tooby

• Suited for life on the Savannah
• Modular brain yields different systems for wanting and liking

CONSCIOUSNESS

• Consciousness is limited
  • 20 bps processor
• Information processed is vast
  • 11,000,000 bits per second

Conscious thought is very expensive

• Conscious processing uses valuable mental energy - Drivers given mental puzzle - Cell phone use

Unconscious (Intuitive) Decisions

• Automatic
• But still usually satisfying

The Elephant and the Rider (Haidt)

• The elephant (Bargh’s ‘Wise Unconscious’) - Makes most day to day decisions
• The rider
  • Has some input, but not as much as we think

But depends on good experience (Klein vs. Kahneman

• Good intuitive decisions are possible
  • when there are consistent learnable patterns underlying outcomes
• But…People do not have a strong ability to distinguish correct intuitions from faulty ones

Intuition runs the show

We experience the world as

conscious choosers

• Either not that way at all
• Or at least much less conscious authority than we believe
• Anti-Introspectivist view of career decision making (Krieshok, 1998)