Can It Have Your Decision, Please?

Decisions are one of the few things people dread to make. It is so hard to do because of how a person worries if they’ve made the right decision or not, and comes with a lot of responsibility to it. There are also other factors that can affect someone’s decision making, such as emotions, age, bias, attention, etc. If researchers can come to understand more about decision making and how it is affected, then this grand mystery of how humans decide things could be cleared up more and pave the way for new information.

One example where this shows up is in an article called “Justice is not blind: Visual attention exaggerates effects of group identification on legal punishment” by Granot and colleagues. In their experiment, they focused on the fact that video surveillance is usually the deciding evidence when it comes to case trials, However, different people can have different interpretations on the video, leading to more dissonance between decision making for punishment. What they decided to do was test a variety of attention targets for videos where major conflict is involved, and seeing what the participants decide. They found that when the participants focused more on one aspect, they had stronger feelings that their focus target was at fault in the conflict. They also tested how much a participant identified and related with their focus target, accounting for internal bias. They found that the more a person identified with their focus target, the less severe the punishment was. This shows that visual attention and bias is very important when it comes to decision making.

Another example is in another article called “A multilevel and dynamic model of intragroup conflict and decision making: application of agent-based modeling” by Wu and colleagues. This article focused on how various levels of participant groups can affect how decisions are made when it comes to conflict. The research team had a total of 6 hypothesis that ranged from a single participant having conflict not affecting decision making to conflict being unpredictable, so then decision making is as well. They found that many of their hypothesis were correct, and that the organization of any group can affect how decisions are made when it comes to conflict. They also found that there was something called conflict inertia, which was that a conflict would have a lasting effect and bleed over. This greatly impacted decision making and how bias and time can affect what action a person takes.

Noting these two studies, it can be scene that decision making is a very complicated process that requires the input of many factors and ideas. More looking will show many articles relating decision making to emotional maturity, age differences, and more factors that can change the way a person makes a decision. Hopefully with more research, decision making can become an act that people will come to dread less, and become less bias to many factors when it comes to important cases.

Reference

Granot, Y., Balcetis, E., Schneider, K. E., & Tyler, T. R. (2014). Justice is not blind: Visual attention exaggerates effects of group identification on legal punishment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2196–2208. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037893

Wu, J., & Sekiguchi, T. (2020). A multilevel and dynamic model of intragroup conflict and decision making: application of agent-based modeling. Frontiers of Business Research in China, 14(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1186/s11782-019-0070-1