Bechara et al

• how this plays out in their lives - like, do they frequently find themselves doing things that they know are wrong?

· isn't it also possible that "normal" participants are simply choosing the option that causes less arousal?

• the best way to avoid arousal is to stay home, yet casinos are incredibly popular?
• arousal that most people experience when making risky choices is reinforcement only for some people
• IGT can predict recidivism in substance abuse
• combine the neuroscientific techniques discussed in the Damasio article with racism-related studies like Dovidio’s
• Would it be the same thing that differentiated a)the normal subjects and b)the patients who did and did not reach the conceptual period.
• how the participants with neurological damage [to the VPFC] would do with fear conditioning and extinction?
• whether ventromedial PFC also contributes to the learned helplessness phenomenon
• decision making can be altered by things outside our conscious control--heuristics, naturally-occurring chemicals, lesions
• when do we develop this unconscious ability? Could this ability be potentially reinforced and when do all the confounding heuristics start to come into play?
• Milgram's study with a control group as well as patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions.
• when asked why he continued to gamble, the man responded that it was only because the money wasn't really his own—

Tversky- Kahneman

• "intuition" (or "implicit knowledge"? "preconscious knowledge"?) can occur (and be accurate!) prior to explicit decision making
• biases in judgments made by all of us, to the very different way these biases in judgments are discussed in connection to psychopathology
• Awareness of these types of heuristics and biases…is important, not only for psychologists but for everyone.
• So, we use heuristics and make mistakes in our decisions making process... so? There is also plenty of (very important data) on why heuristics and stereotypical thinking are so beneficial to our thinking. So- what should I conclude? Clearly I can't do away with using heuristics, so why point out the problems with using them? What am I supposed to do with this information?
• if nothing else, having this information may have gotten me a job or two.
• we were learning exactly how silly humans are, but I think it's bigger than just a few little biases. Consequences: economic and interpersonal, biases and stereotypes
• "Gut Instinct's Surprising Role in Math." –see Wynn article later on
• even if we cannot alter our use of heuristics in many cases, simply being aware of that tendency can affect our behavior.
• Some of the heuristics and biases described in this seminal paper are not universal.
• How heuristics and biases might affect people's understandings and interpretations of Obama and Mccain's debate last night. – yes, how?
• why regression to the mean happens
• I agree that these cognitive short cuts have evolutionary merits, but I also think that in todays day and age, when we have so much access to information and facts, that these cognitive limitations cannot entirely absolve people from the decision they make in terms of how they judge people.
• the modern problem is less an issue of a lack of information than a lack of attention to the right information.
• at least gives struggling stats students some validation for their difficulties

Murphy et al

• impulsivity vs. risk-seeking
• potential confounds (i.e. medication type, severity of illness)
• high comorbidity rates between disorders such as bipolar and substance abuse
• this experiment done with adolescents
• I would have expected that manic pts would have had lower deliberation, since mania is associated with impulsivity.
• if the participants' decision-making skills had improved since they began taking medication
• possible that the participants were not in a manic episode
• I think there is a difference in terms of how depressed versus manic patients interpret information
• Whether verbal clarification would have altered any of their decision making processes?
• only the manic patients were impaired in the quality of their decisions - supports the clinical accounts
• It would be interesting to see this done in bipolar individuals.