Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...

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Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises:

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Theoretical models of financial markets built on the assumption that some investors are overconfident yield one central prediction: overconfident investors will trade too much. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on the basis of a variable that provides a natural proxy for overconfidence--gender. Psychological research has established that men are more prone to overconfidence than women. Thus, models of investor overconfidence predict that men will trade more and perform worse than women. Using account data for over 35,000 households from a large discount brokerage firm, we analyze the common stock investments of men and women from February 1991 through January 1997. Consistent with the predictions of the overconfidence models, we document that men trade 45 percent more than women and earn annual risk-adjusted net returns that are 1.4 percent less than those earned by women. These differences are more pronounced between single men and single women; single men trade 67 percent more than single women and earn annual risk-adjusted net returns that are 2.3 percent less than those earned by single women.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/98110615.pdf?abstractid=139415&rulid=175370&mirid=3

Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment

Theoretical models predict that overconedent investors trade excessively We test this prediction by partitioning investors on gender Psychological research demonstrates that, in areas such as enance, men are more overconedent than women Thus, theory predicts that men will trade more excessively than women Using account data for over 35,000 households from a large discount brokerage, we analyze the common stock investments of men and women from February 1991 through January 1997 We document that men trade 45 percent more than women Trading reduces men’s net returns by 265 percentage points a year as opposed to 172 percentage points for women It’s not what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so Josh Billings, nineteenth century American humorist It is difecult to reconcile the volume of trading observed in equity markets with the trading needs of rational investors Rational investors make periodic contributions and withdrawals from their investment portfolios, rebalance their portfolios, and trade to minimize their taxes Those possessed of superior information may trade speculatively, although rational speculative traders will generally not choose to trade with each other It is unlikely that rational trading needs account for a turnover rate of

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Boys will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment

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Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches

Introduction Human life has always been fraught with risks. But until the first decades of the 19 century, risks were accepted as more or less natural in the sense that they were directly associated with human activity rather than with failures of systems or equipment. Accidents happened as a part of work (which often took place at home), during major building works, when travelling on land or at sea – and of course during wars. This perception changed dramatically after September 15, 1830, when William Huskisson became the first victim of a train accident. The occasion was the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and the train that hit the unfortunate Mr. Huskisson was George Stephenson’s Rocket. More accidents soon followed, involving exploding boilers, derailings, head-on collisions, collapsing bridges, and so on. (As an aside, the first recorded automobile death took place in Ireland on August 31, 1869, when a woman, Mary Ward, was thrown from and fell under the wheels of an experimental steam car built by her cousins. In 2002, road traffic accidents worldwide were estimated to kill 1.2 million people, with at least 20 million people being injured or disabled.) The crucial change that took place in the 19 century was that accidents became associated with the technological systems that people designed, built, and used as part of work, in the name of progress and civilisation. Suddenly, accidents happened not only because the people involved, today referred to as people at the sharp end, did something wrong or because of an act of nature, but also because a human-made system failed. Furthermore, the failures were no longer simple, such as a scaffolding falling down or a wheel axle breaking. The failures were complex, in the sense that they usually defied the immediate understanding of the people at the sharp end. In short, their knowledge and competence was about how to do their work, and not about how the technology worked or functioned. Before this change happened, people could take reasonable precautions against accidents at work because they understood the tools and artefacts they used sufficiently well. After this change had happened, that was no longer the case.

The Changing Nature Of Risks

Throughout the history of human-machine systems design has had a technological bias in the sense that design for technology came first with design for humans as a distant second Over the years this situation became untenable because the growing system complexity made a decomposition approach to design inadequate Seeing that technology-centred design had failed, the pendulum swung to the other side taking the human as the centre of things Yet human-centred design is just as inadequate as machine-centred design, since it implies a dichotomy where one part of the system is seen as opposed to the other This applies not least to the case of automotive environments, where the interaction has a clear purpose, namely safety to negotiate the traffic Design should therefore embrace a function-centred view where the focus is the joint driver-vehicle system Design should serve to further the purposes or goals of the joint system, ie, to be in control vis-a-vis the dynamic traffic environment, by taking the relative strengths and limitations of the components into account and by describing the system on multiple levels

A function-centred approach to joint driver-vehicle system design

Functional modeling for risk assessment of automation in a changing air traffic management environment

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Trying to predict the future is always a daunting task, even if taken lightly. In the case of ergonomics, the question is fortunately not whether ergonomics will have a future, but rather what that future may be. This assertion is not as trivial as it may seem, since it cannot be taken for granted that every scienti®c endeavour will go on forever. Indeed, most scienti®c ®elds, including behavioural science, can show several examples of ®elds or disciplines that have ®rst ̄ourished and then witheredÐor even vanished. Yet as long as humans work, ergonomics is in no danger of vanishing. The reason that ergonomics is not as old as work itself but only came into its own as a science around the middle of the 20th Century (Jastrzebowski 1857 notwithstanding) is simply that until that time the natural human capabilities and the ability to adapt were su cient, by and large, to meet the demands of work. It therefore stands to reason that ergonomics will continue to be needed unless the nature of work suddenly changes to become overly simple or reverts to the stage where it was so, say a hundred years ago. Instead, the di culty in saying something sensible about the future of ergonomics stems from the fact that the development of ergonomics depends on how work develops, rather than the other way around. Winograd and Woods (1997) have argued that the development of a discipline can be motivated either by the abstract logic of the discipline or by the needs of its areas of application. For example, research on medical technology is clearly based on practical needs, while research on graph theory is `abstraction-driven’ Ðthough it may well end up having several practical applications. Despite some courageous attempts to develop normative theories of work, the fact of the matter is that work develops in its own ways and that ergonomics, as a science, is constantly trying to catch up. To say something sensible about the future of ergonomics therefore amounts to saying something sensible about the nature of work in the future. The authors who have contributed to this special issue each try to do this in their own way. Sebastiano Bagnara and Patrizia Marti present a new and rapidly growing ®eld of workÐcall centresÐwhich are characterized as `modern factories’ where services are delivered through information and communication technologies. Call centres provide an excellent illustration of a new type of work that has developed from practical needsÐand further back from technological opportunitiesÐand for which ergonomics must try to ®nd appropriate ways to describe, analyse and explain what is going on. The type of work in call centres presents a challenge to existing ergonomic models and methods, and in that sense indicates one possible future direction or development. John Lee considers three main challenges for cognitive ergonomics that arise from the ever more sophisticated and complex technology with which humans must deal. The challenges are to understand the implications for humans of multi-agent, self-organizing automation, to understand human interaction with increasingly complex automation, and to develop new concepts THEOR. ISSUES IN ERGON. SCI., 2001, VOL. 2, NO. 3, 219±221

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The Future of Ergonomics

An overview of affective computing in respect with the human-computer interaction was presented. It dealt with the affective states of a computer which are similar to humans, hence computer can also show affects and emotions. In this regard, the concept of enhancement of effective of communication by imitating the emotional aspects was also discussed.

Erik Hollnagel

Papers

The Changing Nature Of Risks

A function-centred approach to joint driver-vehicle system design

Functional modeling for risk assessment of automation in a changing air traffic management environment

The Future of Ergonomics

Commentary: is affective computing an oxymoron?