Judgment and decision making: neo-Brunswikian and process-tracing approaches, Peter Juslin and Henry Montgomery, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 344 pp., ISBN 0-8058-3254-8 (hard cover)

✍ Scribed by Cilia Witteman

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 31 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3257
• DOI: 10.1002/bdm.409

✦ Synopsis

Judgment and Decision Making describes the state of the art in 1997 of Swedish judgment and decision making (JDM) research. It is dedicated to Mats Bjo ¨rkman from Uppsala University in Sweden, who celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1997, and who is acknowledged to be the pioneer in Swedish JDM research. All contributors to this volume are colleagues or former students of Mats Bjo ¨rkman.

The volume certainly is not of interest to Swedish researchers only. As the American contributors Kenneth Hammond and Baruch Fischhoff point out in their closing chapters, Swedish JDM research is well known and appreciated far beyond Sweden. Many of the authors of this volume have, for example, contributed to a recent volume on decision making (Ranyard et al., 1997) and are cited in an even more recent interdisciplinary edition on JDM (Connolly et al., 2000).

Two approaches to JDM that are equally prevalent in Swedish research are presented in the volume. The first is the Neo-Brunswikian approach-which stresses the need to use realistic tasks and to recognise the dynamic nature of most everyday decision making. Representative experimental designs are used to study utilities, subjective probabilities and calibration. This is the line of research Bjo ¨rkman introduced.

The second approach views decision making as a cognitive process-akin to problem solving as described by Newell and Simon in 1972. In this process-tracing approach, researchers' aims are to elucidate the decision maker's mental processes before, during, and after decision making.

The two people who are the key researchers in Swedish process-tracing studies today are Henry Montgomery and Ola Svenson. Both present their theory in separate chapters: Montgomery writes on his Search for Dominance Structure (SDS) theory, and Svenson on his Differentiation and Consolidation theory. These theories have, of course, been presented elaborately elsewhere before (for example in their co-edited volume in 1989), but their contributions are welcome in this overview volume. It would have been quite enjoyable if they had both contributed to a chapter in which they discussed each other's approaches and pointed out their major (dis)agreements. As it is, Montgomery does speak to Svenson's position. In Montgomery's view, attained dominance of an alternative is an important criterion in choosing that alternative, whereas Svenson focuses on the degree of differentiation between a chosen and a non-chosen alternative as a decision criterion. Svenson sees dominance as neither sufficient nor necessary. Montgomery, however, introduces the notion of 'subjective dominance', which will include alternatives that have a decisive advantage, by differentiating on some subjective (not specified) dimension between alternatives even when none is strictly dominant. Montgomery points out that both he and Svenson view the important aim of, respectively, dominance structuring and differentiation as the decision maker's ability to defend the decision against future attacks. It is a pity that this point is not taken up by Svenson, who did not, in his chapter, take the opportunity to discuss the (dis)similarities of his DiffCon theory and SDS theory. And remarkably, although Montgomery and Svenson are pre-eminent Swedish decision-making theorists, none of the authors of any of