Zaps 2

ZAPS 2.0

The final ZAPS 2.0 assignment for this class is the decision making experiment, focusing on what influences us when picking one option out of many. The experiment opens up that as simple as this process may seem, there are many processes and influential factors that go along with decision making. Up until recently, psychologists and economists theorized that most people utilized expected utility reasoning, which is taking in a form of “expected gain” and making simple decisions based on projected gains weighed against the possible costs, and simply choosing what results in the highest expected gain. Completing this experiment included answering a series of questions that strived to prove our fallible decision making--where under

In general, cognitive psychology zeroes in on the processes at work between sensation and behavior. The decision making module in ZAPS is a great example supporting the notion that humans are not rational thinkers. Statistically we were asked the same questions and given the same options and statistical outcomes. However, as a class we gave different answers to the same scenarios. Decision making is the in-between transition converting sense into action, and it is this in-between that produced the changes in our answers to essentially the same questions. Cognitive psychology is used day to day, hence this ZAPS experiment applies to ordinary life as well. As discussed in class, surveys can take advantage of principles of framing and anchoring to bias answers, whether on purpose or inadvertently. As scientists it is our responsibility to use this knowledge and make our bias-free experiments. Overall the decision making ZAPS exercise was extremely useful in connecting what we learned in class regarding phenomenon to raw data, and demonstrating how relevant these phenomenons are in day to day