The Aging Mind Opportunities in Cognitive Research (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix C: The Bearable Lightness of Aging: Judgment and Decision Processes in Older Adults
Appendix C: The Bearable Lightness of Aging: Judgment and Decision Processes in Older Adults
Pages 144-165
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From page 144... ...
As a result, understanding the psychological processes that underlie the judgments and decisions of older adults can help us to identify areas in which they may be most vulnerable and therefore can guide efforts to help them face the challenges of aging. Importance of Judgment and Decision Making for Older Adults The impact of age-related changes is magnified further by recent social trends that create a need for maintaining strong decision-making capabilities for a greater number of years.
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From page 145... ...
More and more people are relying heavily on individual, self-directed financial plans in order to maintain their standard of living after retirement. Although some individuals call on professionals to develop a formal financial plan, even formal plans require investors to make critical decisions about when to withdraw or reallocate money in an environment of changing market conditions and tax laws.
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From page 146... ...
Judgments and decisions are influenced by many factors. Social and political attitudes, or worldviews, for example, have been shown to influence risk perceptions (Peters and Slovic, 1996)
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From page 147... ...
A second major theme emerging from research is that people frequently do not know their own "true" values for an object or situation (e.g., the importance of the quality of a health plan versus the importance of its cost)
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demonstrated that older adults performed less well than their younger counterparts on tasks that required conscious control of memory, but they performed equally well on tasks that relied on automatic memory processes (i.e., familiarity)
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The process of aging may be one of the conditions that increases the use of heuristics. Research Directions in Heuristic Processing We focus here on two heuristics the representativeness heuristic and the availability heuristic in order to examine the implications that an increased reliance on heuristic processing might have on the aging individual.
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From page 150... ...
emotional influences on judgments and decisions. The implications for older adults who must use statistical information about health care options and financial plans to make good decisions are important.
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give affect a direct role in motivating behavior, asserting or implying that people integrate positive and negative feelings according to some sort of automatic, rapid "affective algebra," whose operations and rules remain to be discovered. Epstein's (1994:716)
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When a positive marker is associated with the outcome image, it becomes a beacon of incentive. Damasio hypothesized that somatic markers increase the accuracy and efficiency of the decision process, and their absence, observed in people with certain types of brain damage, degrades decision performance.
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From page 153... ...
It seems unlikely that experience playing poker or gin rummy would help individuals to learn in this unfamiliar task. The most interesting possibility is that affect becomes more salient and/ or that the ability to integrate affective and analytical information processing improves with age (e.g., Blanchard-Fields et al., 1987; Labouvie-Vief et al., 1989a, 1989b)
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From page 154... ...
Other affective techniques that do not impose as great a cognitive load may show the hypothesized age-related increases throughout the life span. Affect and Time It is also important to examine how increases in affect and experience relate to time phenomena, such as impulsive consumption, in different age sin addition, the same pattern of correlations held in a second unpublished study in which subjects free-associated to the concept of eating beef.
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From page 155... ...
This result was interpreted as indicating that intuitive, affective processes dominated their rational processing systems. A number of subjects indicated, for example, that the larger bowl "looked more inviting." If older adults rely more on affective processing, they would be expected to draw from the nonoptimal larger bowl more often.
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From page 156... ...
found that the frequentistic portrayal evoked more violent imagery and negative affect, leading many people to judge the risk of releasing Toe from a psychiatric hospital as higher compared with the perceived risk evoked by the percentage probability frame. If affect is more salient to older adults, we might expect that the stronger reaction to relative frequency frames (compared with probability frames)
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From page 157... ...
Information integration is the skill that has been most thoroughly examined by judgment and decision researchers to date, and is therefore an excellent starting point for the development of a decision-making competence scale. Many professionals (physicians, lawyers, economists, psychologists)
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. Of course, for a 95-year-old, longterm survival prospects may not be important, but an otherwise healthy 65year-old may not wish to be led astray by the framing effect and reduce his or her life span unintentionally.
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Given the strong evidence of age-related declines in working memory found in the aging literature and the role of memory in the use of such judgmental heuristics as the availability heuristic, older adults may be more easily influenced by the decision context. Age-related differences in decision consistency have been examined by Chasseigne et al.
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From page 160... ...
Although our initial thoughts on decision making among older adults centered on the inevitable declines of aging, further consideration suggests that improvements associated with experiential thinking may create a decision-making process that is much more bearable to older adults. By bearable, we mean that, despite age declines in cognitive functioning, older adults may adapt quite well to the judgments and decisions required of them in later years.
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Spranca 1997 Protected values. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 70(1)
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Hamann 1990 Assessing treatment decision-making capacity in elderly nursing home residents. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 38(10)
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1996 Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65(3)
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Monahan, and D MacGregor In Violence risk assessment and risk communication: The effects of using actual cases, press providing instruction, and employing probability versus frequency formats.
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Pp. 31-54 in Processing of Medical Information in Aging Patients, D.C.
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