Activities
- International Workshops
- Working Papers
- Review Articles
- Final Publication Volume
First Workshop on Cognitive Theory of Social Action
11-13 June 1998,Turin, Italy
Second Workshop on Probabilistic Reasoning and Decision Making
19-20 February 1999, Milan, Italy
Third Workshop on Explaining Social Norms: Rationality and Cognition
14-16 October 1999, Paris, France
Fourth Workshop on Risk and Decision Making
9-11 December 1999, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Fifth Workshop on Cognitive Economics
15-16 November 2000, Alessandria, Italy and
17-18 November 2000, Torino, Italy
Sixth Workshop on Natural and Cultural Bases of Human Inference
7-10 June 2001, Paris, France
More about the network
The study of the human decision making process embraces several fields, particularly economics, social sciences, and cognitive sciences. But, while there has been an upsurge of interest recently within the European scientific community in reasoning and decision making issues, there has been little interaction between these various fields.
It has become clear in recent years that classical theories, such as those derived from economics, of how decisions are made need to be revised to take account of new knowledge of the underlying psychology and cognitive processes involved. The classical view is that individuals, in effect, compute decisions by assigning scores to each option dependent on some predefined set of rules for determining to what extent each option fulfils the desired outcome. This theory admits that the basis for assigning scores may be subjective and vary from person to person, but does assume that there is a well-defined logical process.
Such theories ignore the underlying cognitive mechanisms behind decision making. This Network is founded largely on the belief that it is necessary to understand these inner mechanisms in order to make good predictions of what decisions people are likely to make faced with a given set of choices. This, in turn, can help predict the macroeconomic behaviour of, say, a group of consumers. Cognitive science is best placed to provide such understanding, but there is a need to ally this with the economic applications and with the perspective provided by the social sciences. To achieve this, the Network is aiming to stimulate the development of common research programmes among cognitive scientists, economists, sociologists and philosophers of science.
More specifically, the Network is contributing to the following rese
- Cognitive models of inductive reasoning responsible for probabilistic judgments by different participants in the economic scene (ie. consumers, government economists, decision makers in financial markets etc).
- Models of human memory to help understand the learning process.
- Cognitive models of expertise for explaining the behaviour of experts in different economic institutions.
- Cognitive foundation of theory of social action.
- Psychology of problem solving and creativity.
- Simulation of economic phenomena through new artificial intelligence tools such as genetic algorithms and neural networks.
It is building on recent research on reasoning and probabilistic judgment that has stressed the importance of cognitive mechanisms in the construction of mental representations of tasks involving estimates and predictions. The latest probabilistic models assume that pre-decision and decision making processes operate jointly. Pre-decision making processes ought to construct a simplified representation of the task, on which the actual decision making process imposes a calculation. But, in some cases, it may be that none of the alternatives available to a decision maker seems particularly palatable. In such cases, the pre-decision making process may interact with the actual computation process to delay the choice, or even try and generate new better alternatives. Alternatively, it may be deemed necessary to obtain additional information for and against each alternative in order to make a more informed decision. Indeed, it may be that mental models will make it possible to predict the type of information individuals may seek and use before expressing a preference for one of the available options.
However, the full interplay between different aspects of decision making needs to be better understood. Through a series of workshops and other networking activities, the Network aims to make a significant contribution to increasing our understanding by bringing together the required disciplines, and also by helping to recruit young researchers and encouraging them to take a fresh approach to the subject.
