Society for the advancement of judgment and decision-making studies

Introduction

The Society for the Advancement of Judgment and Decision-making Studies started to operate in 2014, and held its first regular meeting in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on July 12th and 13th, 2016.

The founding members are scientists from the fields of psychology, economics, neuroscience, and sport sciences, with strong formal or informal linkages to Spanish research institutions, and are committed to the development of Judgment and Decision-making studies in Spain.

Our aims are to create a new platform on which sharing our common interest on this rapidly growing and evolving field, to promote the tutoring of young researchers, to make interdisciplinary collaborations possible, to elaborate joint research projects, and to attract resources and international contacts.

In the last decades, the study of human judgment and decision-making has been proven productive in a variety of fields, as apparently distant as economics, clinical and social psychology, health sciences, ergonomics, sport sciences and politics.

Descriptive approaches have unveiled striking regularities in the way humans make judgments and decisions, and have provided effective ways to improve them in real environments. Normative approaches, on the other hand, have helped scientists and policy makers to draw the boundaries of human grounded rationality, and to develop decision protocols that can substitute or constrain human operators.

The success of judgment and decision-making as a field is based on some definitional features: interdisciplinarity, methodological and descriptive systematicity, continuous transference from the laboratory to daily-life contexts, distrust in over- and micro-theorization, and, over all, a good deal of critical sense. A taste for looking behind the obvious is certainly not uncommon among those who consider themselves judgment and decision scientists.

Currently, in Spain, a number of internationally oriented research teams are contributing to the growing corpus of evidence in this field. Unfortunately, communication among these groups is still scarce, and no regular meetings exist in which authors from different traditions have the chance to learn from each other. Our aim is to close that gap.