What is judgment and decision making (JDM)?

JDM now

Dan Goldstein has two posts that should interest some of you:

What is the field of Judgment and Decision-Making (JDM)?

What Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) is and what it isn’t

In the first of these articles, Dan characterizes judgment and decision making as “a field within Cognitive Psychology” with core topics of are “risk, uncertainty, choice, decision, probability, prediction, future, intertemporal choice, heuristics, utility, forecasting, normative models, prescriptive models, and descriptive models.”

He cites a 1996 post from Barbara Mellers, which “speaks of ‘almost five decades’ of JDM research, which would point to somewhere in the late 1940s. Well after Brunswik, a few years after Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s ‘Theory Games and Economic Behavior’ and a few year’s before Ward Edwards’s Psychological Bulletin article ‘The theory of decision making.'” Dan continues by saying that “the majority of JDM research has always been about the difference between formalisms and human behavior.”

In the second article, Dan gives a “concise definition” of judgment and decision making as “The study of intuitive statistics” and a “longer definition” as “The study of human decision making behavior, formal decision models, and the differences between the two.”

Neither of these two definitions quite work for me. My problem with the “intuitive statistics” definition is that, to me, the core topics of statistics are measurement and inference, neither of which directly map to judgment or decision making. My problem with the longer definition is that it’s missing the “judgment” part.

Regarding that last issue, Dan writes:

Does the difference between judgment and decision making really matter?

Judgments (like estimating the distance of an object or the population of a country), and decisions (like choosing medical treatment A vs B given available information and risks) are different, but they’re so related that I find it convenient to roll everything up into “decision making.” . . . JDM or “judgment and decision making” is now a fixed phrase and there’s not much talk about the distinction between judgments and decisions.

To me they are different! You can read chapter 9 of BDA3 for my take on decision analysis. I think it makes a lot of sense to distinguish between “judgment” and “decision making.” Indeed, I think that theorists and practitioners of statistics have made major errors over the years by trying to frame inferences and judgments as decision problems.

That said, Dan works within the field of JDM and I’m an outsider, so I’d guess that his definition is a good summary of what people in that area are thinking about and working on.

His post is pretty long and even includes some data! I recommend you follow the link and read the whole thing.

Origins of JDM

I associate the field of Judgment and Decision Making with the classic book from 1982, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” edited by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky.

Judgment and decision making is a subfield of psychology with connections to psychophysics (according to britannica.com, the “study of quantitative relations between psychological events and physical events or, more specifically, between sensations and the stimuli that produce them”) and cognitive psychology (according to wikipedia, “the scientific study of mental processes”).

I was curious who’d coined the term, “judgment and decision making.” It’s a good pairing. In 1988 Jon Baron published a book, Thinking and Deciding, a title that I like because it makes me reflect upon these two different processes. I’ve taught classes on decision analysis, but that’s not the same as thinking. That was before Dave Krantz explained to me about goal-based decision making.

A Google scholar search on “judgment and decision making” reveals multiple reviews on the topic, including a book of articles from 1986 edited by Hal R. Arkes and Kenneth R. Hammond, a book chapter by B. Fischoff from 1988, a textbook by J. F. Yates from 1990, a review article from 1998 by B. A. Mellers, A. Schwartz, and A. D. J. Cooke, a book chapter from T. D. Gilovich and D. W. Griffin from a handbook of social psychology published in 2010, and a review article from 2020 by Baruch Fischhoff, and Stephen B. Broomell, and yet another review article, this one by Priscila G. Brust-Renck, Rebecca B. Weldon, and Valerie F. Reyna from 2021.

That’s not all of it either! It makes sense that psychology is a reflective field, and psychologists like to write review articles. As a serial textbook author myself, I’m not complaining.

I don’t have it in me to read all the above reviews, but it would be interesting to compare the two articles by Fischoff that were written 32 years apart.

In the meantime, I still want to know when the term was first used. Going back to Google scholar, I’ll restrict my search to earlier decades.

For the decade 1940-1950, all I find is a reference to an article by J. Don Miller in The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago from 1947, containing phrase, “Neither college nor university training is conducive to the type of judgment and decision-making required in business.” It’s a readable article! But not relevant to the academic study of judgment and decision making that I was thinking of.

For 1950-1960 we see some references to judgment and decision making in business management and in human-factors research in psychology. So, again, no experiments or new theoretical structure. By 1960, the cognitive revolution was well established in psychology, classical (Neumann-Morgenstern) decision analysis was well established within economics and business, and researchers had started to explore various descriptive and normative problems with the classical approach—but it seems that no one had put these together into a new subfield that combined the mathematics/statistics/economics of decision analysis with cognitive psychology.

As of 1960, “judgment and decision making” was thought of as something done by managers at the workplace, not as its own field of study.

In 1960-1970, things begin to change. In 1961, Michael A. Wallach and Nathan Kogan published an article, “Aspects of judgment and decision making: Interrelationships and changes with age.” This is a serious psychology paper, with theories and data, following in the psychophysics tradition that would become so fruitful when continued by Tversky and Kahneman a decade later in their famous experiments on “the law of small numbers,” “anchoring and adjustment,” and other fallacies and heuristics of judgment under uncertainty. The O.G. researcher in this area was Laplace, back in the early 1800s, but here I’m talking about modern research in the area. Going through the references from the 1960s, the phrase “judgment and decision making” still is mostly used in the business context, but theoretical and empirical articles appear from stalwarts such as Ward Edwards (“Dynamic decision theory and probabilistic information processings,” published in the journal Human Factors in 1962) and Paul Slovic (“Risk-taking in children: Age and sex differences,” published in Child Development, 1966). The subfield is beginning to be formed, but is not cohered, nor has it been named.

The 1970s feature a flood of research papers on the topic. Just from the first page of the Google scholar search, there’s “Studies of problem solving, judgment, and decision making: Implications for educational research” from 1975, “Judgment and decision-making in a medical specialty” (1974), “The concept of weight in judgment and decision making: A review and some unifying proposals” (1980), “Studies of problem solving, judgment, and decision making: Implications for educational research” (1975), “Comparison of Bayesian and regression approaches to the study of information processing in judgment” (1971), “Human judgment and decision making: Theories, methods, and procedures” (1980), and so on.

And then come the 1980s, with the Kahneman/Slovic/Tversky book and all the rest. Hey! Here’s an article in the Annual Review of Psychology from 1984 (“Judgment and decision: Theory and application,” by Gordon F. Pitz and Natalie J. Sachs) that states:

A judgment or decision making (JDM) task is characterized either by uncertainty of information or outcome, or by a concern for a person’s preferences, or both. . . . Numerous authors have demonstrated that judgments depart significantly from the prescriptions of formal decision theory (see Kahneman et aI 1982). An earlier review of behavioral decision theory (Slovic et al 1977) was largely devoted to a descriPtion of these inconsistencies. . . . Since theorists are also human, and hence liable to the same biases as their subjects, there may exist a “bias heuristic” that leads psychologists to see biases in all forms of judgment (Berkelely & Humphreys 1982). The last chapter in this area in the Annual Review of Psychology included a critical discussion of the adequacy of prescriptive models for evaluating judgment and decision making (Einhorn & Hogarth 1981). . . .

In 1982 the newly-formed journal Medical Decision Making featured an article by Jay J. J. Christensen-Szalanski on “Recent Developments in the Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making,” and, as early as 1980, there was a book, “Human Judgment and Decision Making: Theories, Methods, and Procedures,” by Kenneth R. Hammond, Gary H. McClelland, and Jeryl Mumpower (see here for a review).