Psychological Models of professional decision making. ( research report)

Last week in a class we were discussing fast and frugal reasoning. My group, we read a research report on how judges make bail decision , written by Mandeep K. Dhami.

Mandeep K. Dhami`s research draws connections between theories in Psychology and issues in Criminology. Her main interests are in judgment and decision making, risk, and criminal justice. She has investigated, for example, heuristic decision making, judicial and juror decision making.

In her study two psychological models Franklin`s rule and matching heuristic were tested in order to predict bail decisions made by judges in two London courts over the period of four months.
Franklin`s rule model involves the combination of multiple differentially weighted cues. By contrast , the matching heuristic uses simple cue-weighting method, searches through a small subset of cues and bases its predictions on one cue alone.

Like most professional decisions, judicial decisions are guided by formal rule. Because most judicial decisions including bail decisions have huge ramification for defendant and public, in theory judges or jurors should search through all information given to them and weight them according to its reliability and validity.

In the present study Dhami hypothesized that on the basis of past psychological research the matching heuristic would be a better predictor of judge`s decisions. By contrast a hypothesis derived from legal theory suggested that Franklin`s rule will outperform the simple heuristic.

Findings of the present study show that judicial decisions in two courts were better predicted by the matching heuristic than by Franklin`s rule. Judges relied on decisions made by police, previous bench suggests that they were either intentionally or unintentionally "passing the buck".

The present findings support the validity of simple heuristic in capturing decision policies under naturalistic conditions and in the group context.