Critical Decision Making and Problem Solving
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| Which way? |
As humans we face many important decisions. We are often confronted with issues that incessantly challenge our minds. Quite often our minds are bogged down with the wants inaccessible to our expectations. Questions, issues, problems, speculations are what takes most of our time: what college or university should I attend? What car should I buy? What should I study? Should I get married? Should I have a baby? Should I resign from my job? What will I eat today? Where do I find money to meet my basic daily needs, etc. In a world of this nature, a theory of practical reasoning should have something to say about how we can improve our decision-making strategies.
The general procedure for applying critical thinking to any problem can be described as a cycle with varied phases. This cycle should however not be treated as a rigid procedure in which each phase must be complete before the next is begun. In practice, you may have to go back to the earlier phase or work on several phases simultaneously, consciously or unconsciously. But if you need to have any real assurance that your ultimate decision is sound, then you must master and apply all phases requisite in decision making and problem solving.
Decision: the act or process of deciding; or a determination arrived at after consideration : conclusion; or a choice that you make about something after thinking about it; or the result of deciding, or the ability to make choices quickly and confidently; or the particular end of a legal or official argument : a legal or official judgment.
Decision making can be regarded as the mental processes (cognitive process) resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice
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The word problem is used in the broad sense: one has a problem when one has a need or question but no obvious answer to it. In this case, all mental dissatisfaction and the quest to grasp the essence of the unknown; be it physical or psychological all counts and falls within what is rightly defined as a “problem”.
As humans we face many important decisions. We are often confronted with issues that incessantly challenge our minds. Quite often our minds are bogged down with the wants inaccessible to our expectations. Questions, issues, problems, speculations are what take most of our time: what college or university should I attend? What car should I buy? What should I study? Should I get married? Should I have a baby? Should I resign from my job? etc. In a world of this nature, a theory of practical reasoning should have something to say about how we can improve our decision-making strategies.
The general procedure for applying critical thinking to any problem can be described as a cycle with five phases. This cycle should however not be treated as a rigid procedure in which each phase must be complete before the next is begun. In practice, you may have to go back to the earlier phase or work on several phases simultaneously. But if you need to have any real assurance that your ultimate decision is sound, then all phases must be complete. The details of each and every phase may vary depending on the problem at stake, but the general principles apply to all situations.
Phases of Decision Making and Problem Solving
The first phase of problem solving involves recognition and definition of the issue at stake. Generally speaking, a typical process of decision-making begins with the recognition of a problem. And for the purposes of this text, the word “problem” will be used in the broad sense: one has a problem when one has a need or question but no obvious answer to it. In this case, all mental in satisfaction and the quest to grasp the essence of the unknown; weather physical or psychological all counts and falls within what is rightly defined as a “problem”. In other words, the quest for knowledge in its totality signifies mental comprehension of the physical and mental phenomenon definitive of human existence. It is commonly true, that many problems are never solved because they are not recognized soon enough or not recognized at all. For example, some freshmen fail in college because they do not recognize soon enough that their study habits are inadequate or that they are in an unsuitable curriculum.
Once a problem has been recognized, it should be carefully defined. Failure to attain a clear definition of a problem will always result in obtaining unsuccessful solutions. In fact, you may end up solving “some” problem but not the one that you were trying to solve. Suppose, for example, that you are the sort of person who is constantly running out of money and unable to meet expenses. You may react in characteristically human fashion – by resenting your employer or those responsible for your financial support for being stingy. And you may, without realizing it, define your problem as how to get even with these people. You may succeed in solving this problem only to realize too late that the real problem was how to reduce your expenditure.
In many situations, defining the problem will be the most difficult phase in decision-making. But once you have correctly defined the problem, the rest will be relatively easy. In most cases, we start with the wrong definition. The thinking you do in the last four phases can help you realize that your original definition was wrong. In this event, be advised that it is ideal that you start all over again at the beginning of the circle. At times, you may find it helpful to use the entire five-phase circle to define the problem.
There are three rules that must be followed in defining the problem. The first is that the definition should not be too general. This is true because if the definition is too broad, the guidelines for a solution will be too broad, and the investigation may flounder. Large problems can be very real, but their solution usually requires breaking them down into smaller, clearly defined ones to be solved one at a time.
The second rule addresses exactly the opposite of the above: the definition should not be too specific. A definition of a problem is said to be too specific when it unnecessarily restricts alternative solutions. When the definition of the problem is too specific, it will always lead to temporary solutions because it will have ignored other significant aspects contribute to the same.
Finally, the definition should not in itself constitute a “solution” to the problem. Suppose that in each year, there is a problem of mass drop-out of doctoral students in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kenyatta university in Kenya, and the Dean of School defines the problem as one due to lack of scholarships and/or financial limitations on the part of the studying students. His definition would in itself have contained the “solution” that more scholarships and financial assistance be extended to doctoral students, the result of which rule out other solutions for consideration. In fact, for this kind of definition to be acceptable, one would first have to solve another problem: that of whether to extend financial assistance versus scholarships. Very often definitions of problems that are themselves solutions also have the fault of being too specific, alternative answers tend to increasingly to be ruled out, until at last only one remains. Let it be noted, however, that not all definitions that are too specific get as far as dictating only one conclusion, and we will do better at defining problems if we keep these two rules in mind.
The second phase in problem solving is the gathering of information. Once a problem is explicitly defined, one should begin to gather information about it. The information may be of many kinds. The detective may call his or her information “clues”; the doctor speak of “symptoms”; the scientist, of “data”; the layperson or government leader, of “facts.” Adequate and accurate information is essential to sound decisions. In general, the more information you have on which to base your decision, the more likely it is that the decision will be sound.
Let us call the third phase of decision-making formation of tentative conclusions which represent solutions to the problem. This can be done as soon as we have enough information to suggest some possible answers. We have to be cautious of the fact that solutions at this stage can only be tentative and we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by them. The objective in this phase is not to settle on one conclusion but rather to formulate as many plausible ones as possible. The more we produce, the more likely we are to conclude a sound one. Furthermore, forming several tentative conclusions is the best safeguard against the dangers of accepting or acting upon a proposed conclusion without adequate evidence. In this phase, it is desirable to give attention to every idea that comes to the mind. This is important because many a times, ideas you might impatiently reject as wild or irrelevant turn out to be solutions of problems or important clues to solutions.
The fourth phase of problem solving entails testing of tentative conclusions. The objective of this phase is to “criticize” all tentative conclusions by assessing their reliability. All tentative conclusions are reached through some kind of inference, a process of reasoning by which they are derived from evidence or available facts.
Suppose, for example, that a young man of seventeen reads this statement in Nation newspaper: “All males must register for the draft when they reach the age of seventeen.” If he concludes that he is about to be drafted and put in the army, his conclusion is the result of an inference. He combines two pieces of evidence, the statement in the newspaper and the fact that he is seventeen, and infers that he is soon to be inducted. If he immediately charges down to a recruiting office in Nairobi to volunteer so that he can choose his branch of the service, he has violated two cardinal rules of effective thinking: he has formed only one tentative conclusion, and he has acted on it without testing it for reliability. Although his conclusion could prove to be true, it is not reliable.
A conclusion is completely reliable only when it is known to be true. In order to know that a conclusion is true you must know that (1) the evidence used is inherently reliable, that is, known to be true; and that (2) all inferences involved are logically flawless (Young 1988, p.34). The young man’s conclusion fails to meet either test. He does not know yet whether the statement in the newspaper is true; newspaper statements are often false.
Furthermore, his inference is faulty: even though registration for the draft might be required, it does not follow that anyone is presently being drafted. The young man’s inference is therefore not reliable at all; he has jumped to a conclusion. Although a completely reliable conclusion that he was about to be drafted would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach- even an order to report for induction could possibly be in error- he should have investigated the situation more fully before acting so; he could consider all the relevant evidence.
Throughout human history we have been notoriously careless in testing our conclusions. Consequently, we have made countless blunders and accumulated a vast amount of misinformation that has led to more blunders. Ideally, all conclusions should be tested for reliability. And if you test some but not others, you may be protecting your cherished beliefs by testing only the tentative conclusions that displease you. In so doing, you defeat the purpose of critical thinking.
Phase five, Evaluation and Decision. The objective of this phase is to determine whether you have found any workable solutions to your problem and, if so, to select the best of them. Thus this phase involves assessing the reliability of solutions based on the testing done in phase four. When you begin testing tentative conclusions by appropriating methods, you will soon discover that completely reliable conclusions are rare. Usually there will be weakness either in the evidence or in the inferences or in both. In practical matters, the best we can hope for is high degree reliability. If we delayed making a decision until we reached absolute reliability, we would dwell forever in the limbo of decision by indecision.
The minimum degree of reliability you should have before accepting or acting on a conclusion varies with the circumstances. A juror in a murder case who believes that convicting an innocent defendant of murder would be a tragic error should demand the high degree of reliability known as true beyond reasonable doubt. A person trying to decide which is better of two boxes of cereal can afford to settle for a much lower degree of reliability since relatively little is at stake.
When evaluation of your tentative conclusions shows that none of them is sufficiently reliable, you should repeat the whole circle. Each time we repeat the circle we are likely to discover new and more promising tentative conclusions. I recommend that the process should be repeated until you have a conclusion with a degree of reliability sufficient for your purpose. One may ask here, how do we know when the degree of reliability is sufficient for our purpose? The answer is that the decision so arrived at must be all lasting decision and should square the problem for now and for the time to come.
By way of summary, we have proposed the following five phases as instrumental to problem solving and decision making, and thereby proving that critical thinking is not only instrumental to problem solving but also that its tentacles extend beyond the domain of decision analysis.
Conclusively, we can say that although decisions can be made using either intuition or reasoning, a combination of both approaches is often used.
Many different techniques of decision making have been developed, ranging from simple rules of thumb, to extremely complex procedures. The method used depends on the nature of the decision to be made and how complex it is.
The method of decision making must follows seven stages:
1. Recognition and definition of the issue at stake
2. Information gathering
3. Listing all possible solutions/options.
4. Setting a time scale and deciding who is responsible for the decision.
5. Weighing up the risks involved.
6. Deciding on values, or in other words what is important.
7. Weighing up the pros and cons of each course of action.
8. Making the decision.
Decision as Intuition Negates the Principle of Rationality.
Some people prefer making decisions simply by intuition. They trust their “gut feelings” more than they trust the analytical methods that require a systematic and mathematical comparative assessment of competing actions that satisfy multiple criteria. Russo and Schoemaker 1989, Schick and Vaughn 1999 encourage people to avoid the use of intuition and instead to base their judgments and decisions on reasoning strategies that are less likely to lead to common errors in reasoning. From this perspective, decision-making should be a matter of calculation, not intuition.
Intuition-based decision-making can lead to many problems, but also calculation-based decision making of the sort recommended by psychologists and economists has some serious pitfalls. A synthesis of these two models has been developed recently to a theory of emotional coherence. Understanding decision making in terms of emotional coherence enables us to appreciate the merits of both intuition and calculation as contributors to effective practical reasoning.
Decision as Intuition
Suppose you are a student trying to decide whether to study liberal arts, in which you have a strong interest or a subject such as economics or computer science that may lead to a more lucrative career. To make this decision intuitively is just to go with the option supported by your emotional reactions to the two alternatives. In the end, the intuitive decision makers choose an option based on what their emotional reactions tell them is preferable.
The advantage of intuitive decision-making is speed. An emotional reaction can be immediate and lead directly to a decision. If your choice is between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, it would be pointless to spend a lot of time deliberating about the advantages and disadvantages of the two flavors. Instead, an emotional reaction such as “chocolate-yum!” can make for a quick appropriate decision. Another advantage is that basing your decisions on emotions helps to ensure that the decisions take into account what you really care about. If you are pleased and excited about a possible action that is a good sign that the action promises to accomplish the goals that are genuinely important to you. Finally, decisions based on emotional intuitions lead directly to action: the positive feeling toward an option will motivate you to carry it out.
But emotion-based intuitive decision- making can also have serious disadvantages. An option may seem emotionally appealing because of failure to consider to other available options. Intuition may suggest buying chocolate ice cream only because you have failed to consider a low-fat alternative that would be a healthier choice. Intuition is also subject to the intense craving that drug addicts call “appetizing.” If you are appetizing for cocaine, food, or Mercedes-Benz convertible, your intuition will tell you to choose what you crave, but only because the craving has emotionally swamped other desires that you will be more aware of when the craving is less intense.
Another problem with intuition is that it may be based on inaccurate or irrelevant information. Suppose you need to decide whom to hire for a job. If you are prejudiced against people of a particular race, sex or ethnicity, then your intuition will tell you not to hire them, even if they have better qualifications. It is difficult to determine introspectively whether your intuition derive from reliable and relevant information.
Finally, intuitive reasoning is problematic in-group situations where decisions need to be made collectively. If other people disagree with your choices, you cannot simply contend that your intuitions are stronger or better than the intuitions of others. Defending your emotional reactions and attempting to reach a consensus with other people requires a more analytical approach than simply expressing your gut feelings.
Types of Decision Making
1. Decision as Calculation
Experts on decision making recommend a more systematic and calculating
approach. For example, Bazerman (1994, p.4) says that rational decision making
should include the following six steps: 1. Define the problem, characterizing the general purpose of your decision.
2. Identify the criteria, specifying the goals or objectives that you want to accomplish.
3. Weight the criteria, deciding the relative importance of the goals.
4. Generate alternatives, identifying possible courses of action that might accomplish your various goals.
5. Rate each alternative on each criterion, assessing the extent to which each action would accomplish each goal.
6. Compute the optimal decision, evaluating each alternative by multiplying the expected effectiveness of each alternative with respect to a criterion times the weight of the criterion, then adding up the expected value of the alternative with respect to all criteria.
We can then pick the alternative with the highest expected value and make a decision based on calculation, not on emotional reactions. Some people dismiss this process and find it offensive that important decisions in their lives might be made mathematically. Some notable advantages of calculation over intuition method are: first it is set up to avoid neglecting relevant alternatives and goals. Second it makes explicit the consideration of how the various alternatives contribute to the various goals. Third, it puts the decision making process out in the open, enabling it to be carefully reviewed by a particular decision maker and also by others involved in a group decision process.
However, the calculation method can more difficult and less effective especially where the choices are equally relevant. For example, if one is trying to decide what to study between philosophy and computer science, you list all the criteria and estimate the extent to which each option satisfies them and then proceed to a calculation of the expected value of the competing choices. Having done this, you find that the expected value of one option, say philosophy, exceeds that of the other. But what if you have the reaction “I don’t want to do that!” it may be the numerical weights that you put on your criteria do not reflect what you really care about.
There is empirical evidence that calculation may sometimes be inferior to intuition in making good judgments. People with mental problems do not know what they care about hence cannot have emotional evaluations. It seems, therefore, that we need a model of decision-making that is more psychologically natural and more normatively effective than the calculation model. We shall now consider decision making in terms of emotional coherence.
2. Decision as Coherence
Decision-making is a kind of inference, but what is inference? Many
philosophers have taken deductive logic as the model for inference. For
example:
Whenever you want ice cream, you should order
chocolate.
You want ice cream.
Therefore you should order chocolate.
You want ice cream.
Therefore you should order chocolate.
Unfortunately, we rarely have general rules that tell us exactly what to do, so deduction is not a good model for practical inference. A second familiar model of inference is calculation. But there is a third general model of inference that advocates the following rule: accept a representation if and only if it coheres maximally with the rest of your presentations. Many philosophers have advocated coherence theories of inference but have left rather vague how to maximize coherence (see, e.g., Harman 1986, Brink 1989, and Hurley 1989). A precise and general model of coherence based inference can b constructed in terms of constraint satisfaction (Thagard and Verbeurgt 1998, Thagard 2000).
When we make sense of a text, picture, person or event, we need to construct an interpretation that fits with the available information better than alternative interpretations. The best interpretation is one that provides the most coherent account of what we want to understand. Coherence can be understood in terms of maximal satisfaction of multiple constraints, in a manner informally summarized as follows:
1. Elements are representations such as concepts, propositions, parts of images, goals, actions and so on2. Elements can cohere (fit together) or incoherent (resist fitting together). Coherence relations include explanation, deduction, facilitation, association and so on. Incoherence relations include inconsistence, incompatibility, and negative association.
3. If two elements cohere, there is a positive constraint between them. If two elements incoherent, there is a negative constraint between them.
4. Elements are to be divided into ones that are accepted and ones that are rejected.
5. A positive constraint between two elements can be satisfied either by accepting both of the elements or by rejecting both of the elements.
6. A negative constraint between two elements can be satisfied only by accepting one element and rejecting the other.
7. The coherence problem consists of dividing a set of elements into accepted and rejected sets in a way that satisfies the most constraints.
Computing coherence is a matter of maximizing constraint satisfaction and can be approximately accomplished by several different algorithms. The most psychologically appealing models of coherence optimization are provided in constructionist algorithms. These are neuron-like units to represent elements and excitation and inhibitory links to represent positive and negative constraints. Coherence can be measured in terms of the degree of constraint satisfaction accomplished by the various algorithms .the computational problem of exactly maximizing coherence is very difficult, but there are effective algorithms for approximately maximizing coherence in terms of constraint satisfaction (Thargad and Verbeurgt 1998)
More specifically, deliberative coherence can be specified by the following principles:
1. Symmetry- coherence and incoherence are symmetrical relations: if factor (action or goal) f1 coheres with factor f2, then f2 coheres with f1.
2. Facilitation- consider actions A1…And that together facilitate the accomplishment of goal G. then (a) each A1 coheres with G, (b) each A1 coheres with each other, and (c) the greater the number of actions required, the less the coherence among the actions and goals.
3. Incompatibility- (a) if two factors cannot both be performed or achieved, then they is strongly incoherent. (b) if two factors are difficult to perform or achieve together, then they are weakly incoherent.
4. goal priority- some goals are desirable for intrinsic or other non-coherence reasons.
5. Judgment- facilitation and competition relations can depend on coherence with judgments about the acceptability of factual beliefs.
6. decision- decisions are made on the basis of an assessment of the overall coherence of a set of actions and goals.
3. Emotional Coherence
In the theory of coherence, elements have the epistemic status of being
accepted or rejected. In addition to acceptability, elements in coherence
systems have an emotional valence, which can be positive or negative. Depending
on the nature of what the elements represents, the valence of an element can
indicate likeability, desirability, or other positive or negative attitude. For
example, the valence of mother Theresa for most people is highly positive,
while the valence of Adolf Hitler is highly negative. Just as elements are related to each other by the positive and negative deliberative constrains, so they also can be related by positive and negative valence constraints. Some elements have intrinsic positive and negative valences, for example, pleasure and pain. Other elements can acquire valences by virtue of their connections with elements that have intrinsic valences. For example if one has a positive association between the concepts of dentist and pain, where pain has an intrinsic negative valence, then dentist can acquire a negative valence. However, just as the acceptability of an element depends on the acceptability of the elements that constrain it, so the valence of an element depends on the valences of all the elements that constrain it.
The basic theory of emotional coherence can be summarized in three principles analogous to the qualitative principles of coherence:
1. Elements have positive or negative valences.
2. Elements can have positive or negative emotional connections to other elements.
3. The valence of an element is determined by the valences and acceptability of all the elements to which it is connected.
The coherence model of decision-making allows goals to be adjusted in importance while evaluating a decision, but it does not address the question of how we adopt new goals. Milligram’s (1997) account of practical induction is useful for describing how people in novel situations can develop new interests that provide them with new goals. A full theory of decision-making would have to include an account of where human goals come from and how they can be evaluated. People who have their decisions only on the goals of sex, drugs, and rock and roll may achieve local coherence, but they have much to learn about the full range of pursuits that enrich human lives.
Further study questions
1. “A promiscuous man has a sexual affair with a
Nanny (his house girl) and he tells her – ‘you are so good’. Then the Nanny
responds back – “yes thank you, in fact even the houseboy says am better than
madam your wife”. How should this man proceed in making a decision that would
sort out the mess in his household?
2. Assume that you are a girl aged 16 years and a victim of sexual assault by your own father. If you told your mother who is a house wife the incident is likely to spark off hatred and eventual divorce between your parents. If you keep it to yourself you will continuously be traumatized by this grisly and heinous act. If your mum gets to know of the act via other sources or means she will never forgive you. And if the matter leaks to the wider community your father, the sole bread winner for the family will be jailed or face mob justice that may end his life, leaving you and your siblings helpless and out of school. How would you proceed in making your decision such that it does not hurt any of the parties involved but at the same time be a lesson to the offender?
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