Thesis defense today!

I am not a psychologist nor have any expertise in the field, but a naturalist’s curiosity. You folks talking about physical damage to the brain affecting one’s decision making reminded me of this article I read, where a man’s basic personality was drastically altered by a severe injury to his brain.

There is a whole chapter on Gage.

Thank you! Looking forward to digging in.

Thank you as well, I would very much like to read that.

So, now that I have my Master’s degree (diploma pending). Should I let my company know? Is there a benefit, since it’s unrelated to the work I do?

Worth a shot, at the very least. The worst case scenario I guess I could envision is that they take your earning an unrelated degree as a sign that you’re thinking of leaving and make assumptions from there; up to you to decide how paranoid your bosses are :)

Yeah, this is my thinking as well.

I would let them know. Certainly if you work in education at all, it could result in an automatic pay raise.

Or it could be seen as a step to a new job!

Hell yeah you tell your bosses! It’s raise time, bitches!

nowIamthemaster

Isn’t it? But think about it. In order to make the most rationale decision, how much information would you need to take into account? Even the most basic decisions have 1,000’s of different variables that could have an impact. How would wearing a blue shirt differ from the red one? Is one warming, is one more comfortable. Does it clash with your clothing? Will your spouse like it? Does you boss like it? Will it fad in the sun? Does it get wet easily? If you need that shirt tomorrow?

Or, you could wear the blue shirt because you like it, and get on with life.
Why do you like it? There are a million reasons (your spouse gave you a compliment once, your got a promotion the day you wore it, your favorite team one the game) or maybe none that you are conscious of, but in the end, you have a positive affect associated with that blue shirt, so that’s why you put it on. And it took you 10 seconds to make that decision. Maybe less.

That’s the point of affect heuristics. You emotions help boil down all your past experiences associated with a decision with good or bad affect.

In my thesis, people play a simple card game. 4 decks of cards (PC generated in this case). Each turn, the player choices a deck with idea of what will happen. Each card reveals an amount earned but there is a chance that it will reveal a loss.

What my research and others have shown is that after only 20 to 30 turns (so at most, 5 to 8 cards from each deck, if you are randomly making selections) people start to prefer decks with fewer loss events. Outside research indicates that people aren’t even aware of the bias.

Anyway, the point is that logic, while great, is an irrational approach to most day to day decisions. That it is simple to time consumer. And the cases studies in which people have damage to emotional centers of brains kind of bare this out. These people are unable to make simple decisions, as they constantly weigh the pros and cons of everything. Without emotions to decide what’ a ‘better out’ how do you decide between two options?