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Professor at Potsdam's Clarkson guides summer workshop in Germany

Posted 9/18/15

POTSDAM -- Clarkson University Associate Professor of Psychology Andreas Wilke guided a one-week workshop over summer in Germany on "the evolved foundations of decision-making," the school said. …

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Professor at Potsdam's Clarkson guides summer workshop in Germany

Posted

POTSDAM -- Clarkson University Associate Professor of Psychology Andreas Wilke guided a one-week workshop over summer in Germany on "the evolved foundations of decision-making," the school said.

Wilke was one of 17 faculty from around the world to travel to Jena, Germany, in August to teach a workshop at the Ninth Summer School of the International Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World (IMPRS Uncertainty).

The program combined approaches from economics, law and psychology to explain human decision making under risk and uncertainty more effectively and to better design institutional responses.

Wilke, whose expertise is in judgement and decision making, said different disciplines use different approaches to study decision making. For example, economists study rational choice models, expected utilities or mathematical axioms in idealized choice settings, while psychologists study the cognitive mechanisms people utilize to make such decisions in specific real world environments.

Psychologists are particularly interested in the many decisions people face in which they may not have all the available information or they lack time and cognitive resources to make an ideal decision.

"Economists typically focus on the normative question of how decision makers should choose, and psychologists focus on the descriptive question of how decisions are actually made by individuals, groups or institutions," Wilke said. "Having multiple theoretical approaches to work with is important, but we need to make sure that we also train people to make decisions with the kind of information that is available to them, which may be contradicting, limited or even absent."

Wilke said people are generally quite good in dealing with the risks inherent in everyday life and how it affects their decision making process. Uncertainty, however, is difficult for people to grasp -- it worries and bothers them -- because they don't know how to reduce it or what could happen next.