Decoupling Judgment and Decision Making: A Tale of Two Tails

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Risk Communication

Background:

• Decision-making and judgment are often conflated in research, hindering understanding of suboptimal choices.
• Existing literature suggests decisions are less accurate than judgments, potentially due to visualization interpretation or heuristic use.
• Clarifying the distinction between judgment and decision-making is crucial for improving risk communication and public safety.

Purpose of the Study:

• To decouple judgment from decision-making in the context of understanding risk probabilities.
• To investigate how task type (judgment vs. decision making), scenario (sports vs. humanitarian), and visualization type affect accuracy.
• To determine if judgments can serve as reliable proxies for decision-making in visualization research.

Main Methods:

• Conducted two preregistered experiments with 601 participants.
• Manipulated task type (judgment vs. decision making), scenario context, and visualization types (quantile dotplots, density plots, probability bars).
• Analyzed accuracy and susceptibility to biases like status-quo bias.

Main Results:

• Experiment 1 was inconclusive; Experiment 2 provided evidence for differences between judgment and decision-making tasks.
• Contrary to prior research, decisions were found to be more accurate than judgments in Experiment 2.
• Decisions were less vulnerable to status-quo bias, indicating a potential preference for action over inaction.
• Both scenario and visualization types significantly influenced judgment and decision-making accuracy.

Conclusions:

• Judgments cannot be reliably used as proxy tasks for decision-making in visualization research.
• Decision-making processes may be less susceptible to certain biases compared to judgment tasks.
• Findings have implications for designing effective visualizations for risk communication and public decision support.