Samenvatting - Behavioral Decision Making (YF3005)

Behavioral Decision Making
Evidence-based practice (EBP) = the conscientious (effort), explicit (clarity) and judicious (critical of
quality) use of the best available evidence from multiple sources to increase the likelihood of a
favourable outcome
- About the process
- Not about certainties
- About probabilities and likelihoods
- About reducing uncertainty
- Used first to identify problem or opportunity and if (and only if) one identified. Then used to
identify possible solution or invention.
- 4 sources
 Scientific literature
 Stakeholders
 Organization
 Practioners
- 6 steps
 Asking: Translating a practical issue or problem into an answerable question
 When encountering a problem, take a step back and spend time thinking
about what the problem really is.
 Feels uncomfortable because we prefer talking about solutions and we are
incentivized to do things all the time
 Acquiring: Systematically searching for and retrieving the evidence (get all info
together)
 Appraising: Critically judging the trustworthiness and relevance of the evidence for
each study
 Aggregating: Weighing and pulling together the evidence
 Applying: Incorporating the evidence into decision-making process
 Assessing: Evaluating the outcome of the decision taken
- 3 key differences between evidence-based practice and what we already do
 Approach to use of evidence
 Conscientious: persevere, be diligent, build capacity and capability
 Explicit: share, discuss, capture
 Judicious: judge quality, don’t automatically trust, focus on the best evidence
 Multiple sources
 To triangulate and cross-check (get the same picture from different sources)
 To contextualize and make sense and better use of evidence from other
sources
 A structured and stepped approach
 Get evidence first and then consider evidence for possible solutions
 Helps dealing with being easily distracted and pushed off course
 Structure helps dealing with many obstacles
- May seen as irrelevant but also harmful
 Slows things down
 Raises questions about the purpose of activities
 Reduces decision-making autonomy
 Can open decision-makers up to unwelcome and unfamiliar scrutiny
 A fear that EBP may raise the ghost of decision past

1

, -
- Why not popular?
 Focusing way too much on ‘the science’
 Not acknowledging that universities and academics are part of the problem of low adoption not
part of the solution
 Framing it as part of the practitioner/academic divide/gap debate
 Implying that scientists are somehow better compared to managers when they are not
 Making EBP sound like a technocratic solution which can only be undertaken by experts, nerds,
wonks, brainiacs, elites…
 Being too myth-bustery - trends to alienate rather than engage - crucial to challenge dodgy stuff
but needs to be much more sophisticate
 Not sufficiently appreciating how the work context pulls practitioners away from EBP. Not
appreciating managers constraints and incentives
 Implying practitioners are making mistakes or are silly or odd or not thing straight
 Sounding (and being) smug and preachy – ‘you really should do this it’s good for you’
 Not being sufficiently clear about when an EBP approach makes more or less sense
 Not engaging effectively with reasonable objections to EBP
 Insufficient focus on the ‘diagnosis’ part of EBP and too much focus on using EBP to find a solution
 Positioning EBP as something individuals or teams can do when it requires structural and
systemic thinking and action
 Not emphasizing that the quality of decision-making is about the process not the
outcome
 Failing to clarify EBP is not a one-off thing but needs to be part of a long term process
 Not starting from where practitioners are now and what they can realistically do now
 Positioning EBP as about making rally very well-informed decisions rather than better-
informed decisions
 Focusing on the teeny-tiny incy-wincy proportion of practitioners who want and are able
to try EBP



- It’s the activation of your autonomic nervous system, this is known as nervous energy = you
increased energy or arousal leads to the likelihood of the dominant response occurring.
- Social loafing = a tendency to put forth less effort when working on a group task, if the
individual contributions aren’t evaluated.

Processes that can occur when individuals come together in a group
- Conformity = peer pressure: conformity is a tendency for people to bring their behaviours in
line with group norms --> it’s powerful in social situations
 Positive group behavior: lead to peace, harmony and happiness
 Negative group behavior: can be catastrophic
- Group polarization = a phenomenon in which group decision enhances or amplifies the
original opinion of group members and for this to happen several factors must be present.
 1: All the views do not have equal influence,
 So for a view point to influence a group’s final decision, it’s shared by the majority of
individuals in the group.
 2: In discussions about the topic, arguments made tend to favour the majority of
popular view and any criticism is directed to the minority view and this is called
confirmation bias.
- Group thinking: occurs when maintaining harmony among group members is more important
than carefully analysing the problem at hand.

2

,  Cohesive groups that are insulated from other people’s opinions and feel that they
are invulnerable

Causes of groupthink:
- In highly cohesive groups with strong leaders when the social pressure to maintain
conformity and harmony in the group overrides sound decision-making
- When the group isolates itself from outside ideas and influences and group members
overestimate the group
- When there is strong pressure on individuals resulting from external threat
- In case there is a lack of systematic procedures that guide accurate collection of evidence

Prevent groupthink:
- Breach group isolation
- Breach conformity
- Leadership style
 Leader impartiality until a decision is reached
 Encourage a norma of critical thinking in the group
- Generating alternatives and leave the possibility to re-evaluate decisions

 How does groups reach a consensus? Groups implement a procedure that is called robust
average
 Good collective decisions require 2 components: deliberation & diversity in opinions
 Make voice heard in societies by direct or indirect voting
 You have group-level things and individual-level things
 High cultural diversity groups: centralization leads to better performance
 High national diversity groups: uncertainty about team potency
 Individual intelligence is very different from group intelligence
 If you look at the groups average member intelligence (at the individual level) it only
explains a very limited amount in the differences in the group performance

- What determines variance in group performance?
 Compositional theories: focus on personal attributes of group members --> mixed
results (e.g. use all kinds of personal characteristics)
 Structural theories: focus on patterns of interactions among group members --> little
evidence and much debate (how is the network in the group and how do they work
together)
- Predictors of group performance:
 Diversity: distribution of differences among group members regarding grade, tenure,
gender, age and culture
 Workflow network density: average strength of relations in the group
 Workflow network centralization: structural aspects of how people work together
- Outcomes of group performance:
 Potency: generalized beliefs in the team about it’s performance capacities
 Performance: expert staff ratings of team’s final reports
- There are different kind of variables about teamwork and how they are related to each other




3