The Development of Judgment and Decision Making in

Children and Adolescents - 1st Edition

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/the-development-of-judgment-and-decision-making-in-c
hildren-and-adolescents-1st-edition/

Click Download Now

Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers

10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The development of judgment and decision making in children and adolescents /
edited by Janis E. Jacobs and Paul A. Klaczynski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-8058-4256-X (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Judgment in children. 2. Decision making in children.
3. Judgment in adolescence. 4. Decision making in adolescence.
I. Jacobs, Janis E. II. Klaczynski, Paul A.

BF723.J8D48 2005
155.4'1383-Klc22 2004050658
CIP

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper,

and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Dedicated to
Wayne Osgood and Logan Osgood-Jacobs
and to the memory of Nancy Klaczynski
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Preface xi

PART I: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACHES

TO JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 1

1 The Development of Self-Regulated Decision Making 5

James P. Byrnes

2 Metacognition and Cognitive Variability: A Dual-Process

Model of Decision Making and Its Development 39
Paul A. Klaczynski

3 Risky Decision Making in Childhood and Adolescence:

A Fuzzy-Trace Theory Approach 77
Valerie F. Reyna, Mary B. Adam, Kristin M. Poirier,
Craig W. LeCray, & Charles ]. Brainerd

Commentary: Development and Decisions 107

Keith E. Stanovich
vii
Viii CONTENTS

PART II: CONTEXTUAL INFLUENCES

ON DECISION MAKING 115

4 Anticipating and Avoiding Regret as a Model

of Adolescent Decision Making 119
Eric Amsel, Troy Bowden, Jennifer Cottrett, & James Sullivan

5 "Everyone Else Is Doing It": Relations Between Bias

in Base-Rate Estimates and Involvement 157
in Deviant Behaviors
Janis E. Jacobs & Kristen E. Johnston

6 Culture and the Construction of Concepts of Personal

Autonomy and Democratic Decision Making 181
Charles C. Helwig

7 Not All Hurried Children Are the Same: Children's

Participation in Deciding on and Planning Their
After-School Activities 213
Mary Gauvain & Susan M. Perez

Commentary: Lessons From a Life-Span Perspective

to Adolescent Decision Making 241
Cynthia A. Berg

PART IE: DECISION MAKING IN THE REAL WORLD 251

8 The Role of Consultants in Adolescents' Decision Making:

A Focus on Abortion Decisions 255
Laura L. Finken

9 Crime, Competence, and Culpability: Adolescent

Judgment in the Justice System 279
Elizabeth Cauffman & Jennifer Woolard

10 Setting Goals and Making Plans: How Children

and Adolescents Frame Their Decisions 303
Kathleen M. Gafotti

Commentary: The Development of Thinking 327

David Moshman
CONTENTS IX

Afterword: Development of and in Behavioral

Decision Research 335
Baruch Fischhoff

Author Index 347

Subject Index 361

This page intentionally left blank
 Preface

In recent years, newspaper articles, television specials, and other media

events have focused on the numerous hard decisions faced by today's youth,
often pointing to teen pregnancy, drug use, and delinquency as evidence of
faulty judgment. Over the past 10 years, many groups—including parents,
educators, policymakers, and researchers—have become concerned about
the decision making of children and adolescents, asking why they make risky
choices, how they can be taught to be better decision makers, and what types
of age-related changes occur in decision making. Evidence of this concern
comes from the multitude of decision-making programs currently being im-
plemented in schools around the country, some at the explicit request of leg-
islators trying to lower the numbers of teen pregnancies, drunken drivers,
and substance abusers. Too often, these programs have been implemented
with little regard to basic research on cognitive, emotional, and contextual
changes that sometimes support and sometimes inhibit decision making.
Although many universities currently teach courses on decision making
within psychology, education, and/or business, and those courses generally
include sections on social judgment and decision making, developmental
trends in decision making are often given sparse, if any, attention. Indeed, a
quick scan of any child-development textbook reveals very few references to
decision making. With few exceptions, even in adolescent textbooks, the
processes underlying decision making are discussed only briefly, and when
the topic is mentioned, the research focuses exclusively on reasoning capabil-
ities and is typically rooted in traditional developmental models that may not
xi
Xii PREFACE

work as we try to understand the social and contextual, as well as cognitive,

underpinnings of the ontogeny of judgment and decision making. Thus, de-
spite widespread interest from policymakers, the media, educators, parents,
and psychologists in how youth make decisions, and despite numerous pro-
grams aimed at improving adolescent decision making, little research has fo-
cused on the cognitive, emotional, and contextual processes that underlie
the development of judgment and decision making.
Why is there such a dearth of developmental research on these issues?
Most traditional theories regard cognitive development as a unidirectional
progression from either intuitive thinking to logical, scientific reasoning (e.g.,
Inhelder & Piaget, 1958); from an initially inefficient state to a state of
greater efficiency (e.g., information-processing); or from states of limited un-
derstanding and complexity to more advanced understanding and computa-
tional complexity (e.g., neo-Piagetian "theory-theory"). As we have dis-
cussed elsewhere (Jacobs & Klaczynski, 2002), these perspectives do not
mesh very well with research on adult judgment and decision making. Spe-
cifically, research with adults has shown that, although adults are surprisingly
proficient on some decision tasks, they commonly fall prey to judgment bi-
ases, ignore important information, or make non-optimal decisions across a
wide array of situations. Portraits of adults as irrational decision makers are
incongruent with the traditional developmental position that development is
marked by progression toward more efficient, logical, and computationally
complex judgments. Indeed, data accumulated over the past decade indicate
that the traditional theories of cognitive development cannot provide viable
explanations for counterintuitive, age-related trends in judgment and deci-
sion biases observed by a number of scholars. Although relatively small, this
corpus of evidence suggests that new models are needed that can account for
both the development of inferential limitations and judgment biases and the
improvements in reasoning that are typically associated with development.
These new models must also go beyond cognitive perspectives to include a
broader array of explanatory variables and contexts if we are to truly under-
stand the development of judgment and decision making.
We hope that this volume will serve as a starting place for those inter-
ested in considering new ways of thinking about the development of these is-
sues. Because the area of study is relatively novel, relevant research has been
published in disparate places; thus, assembling a coherent picture of develop-
ment in this area is an exceedingly difficult task. The purpose of this volume
is to bring together the voices of several authors who are conducting cutting-
edge research and developing new theoretical perspectives related to the de-
velopment of judgment and decision making. Due to the newness of this area
of study, we also wanted to be thinking deeply and critically about this work;
therefore, we included commentaries and an afterward by noted researchers
in the fields of developmental psychology and decision research.
PREFACE Xffl

The volume includes three parts: Part I: Cognitive Developmental Ap-

proaches to Judgment and Decision Making (emphasizing different theoretical
perspectives on the cognitive aspects of decision making and research support'
ing each); Part II: Contextual Influences on Decision Making (stressing the
social nature of decision making and the importance of context); and Part III:
Decision Making in the Real World (highlighting research that uses current
theoretical perspectives in applied settings). Each section begins with an over-
view to highlight critical links and differences between the chapters, and each
section is followed by a commentary by developmentalists noted for their work
in related fields. Finally, we conclude the volume with an Afterword written by
Baruch Fischhoff, one of the leading researchers on the topic of decision mak-
ing in adults and a long'time advocate of investigating and understanding the
developmental roots of adult risk assessment, judgment, and decision making.
Part I, on the Cognitive Developmental Approaches to Judgment and De-
cision Making, presents three distinctive developmental models that offer
different explanations of "what develops" and the relative importance of dif-
ferent cognitive components and experiential components that may be im-
portant for developing judgment and decision-making skills. The differences
and similarities in the theoretical perspectives lead to different predictions
and diverse explanations for patterns of development. The goal of presenting
such disparate perspectives is to provide a variety of lenses or frames for the
chapters that follow. We hope this will allow readers to consider numerous
underlying causes and developmental trajectories as they digest the studies
highlighting context and real-world applications.
Part II, related to Contextual Influences on Decision Making, emphasizes
the emotional, cultural, and social aspects of decision making, three topics
that have been influential in the adult literature on judgment and decision
making, but are just beginning to be explored in the developmental area.
These chapters again represent diverse perspectives, but present a coherent
picture of the many noncognitive aspects of decision making that play a role
in development. These are especially important considerations for those in-
terested in adolescent risk taking and risky decisions. As a group, these chap-
ters represent important advances in our understanding of decision making
and its development. Although the particular contexts and variables of inter-
est differ in each chapter, these chapters consistently show that decision
making is affected by particular cultural, peer, and family contexts; by the
emotions that often accompany decision making; and by age-related changes
in these contexts and emotional experiences. Collectively, these chapters
support the contention that, to fully understand judgment and decision mak-
ing during childhood and adolescence, we must continue to explore the con-
texts in which decisions are made.
Finally, Part III, Decision Making in the Real World, provides three ex-
amples of research that apply developmental and decision-making models to
XJV PREFACE

practical research questions. The applications vary from legal decisions to

personal goals to abortion decisions, but they all involve decision making in
important settings in which children and adolescents function. This section
provides much-needed "grounding" for research in this area, highlighting the
need for more interaction among basic and applied researchers, as well as
collaborations with policymakers. These chapters were included to begin to
draw attention to some of the factors (e.g., media, peers, parents) that might
be considered by those interested in understanding child and adolescent de-
cision making within meaningful, real-world situations.
When we began this volume, the overarching goal was to present a coher-
ent picture of the current state of research and theory on the development of
judgment and decision making. As we invited authors and solicited chapters,
we found that the word "coherent" dropped out of our description of the
project. Indeed, the theoretical perspectives, research, and concepts began to
appear more chaotic than coherent as we realized that we wanted to include
a broad array of conceptual and empirical ideas. These choices were inten-
tional, because this is a new and dynamic area of study—one that will benefit
most by presenting a variety of perspectives and topics in order to fuel the
next generation of ideas and research. Thus, our ultimate goals are to en-
courage readers to consider new ideas for why adolescents might be making
particular decisions; to apply innovative models to policy and programming
questions; and finally, to stimulate novel and wide-ranging research on these
topics.

—Janis E. Jacobs
—Paul A. Klaczynski

REFERENCES
Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking: From childhood to adolescence. New
York: Basic Books.
Jacobs, J. E., & Klaczynski, P. A. (2002). The development of judgment and decision making
during childhood and adolescence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11,145-149.
 I
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTAL
APPROACHES TO JUDGMENT
AND DECISION MAKING

As we noted in the Preface, the developmental study of decision

making is in its infancy. Although substantial research docu-
ments the cognitive underpinnings of adults' decisions, far fewer
attempts have been made with children and adolescents. Fortu-
nately, cognitive developmental research on decision making
appears to be on the rise. The chapters in Part I represent three
distinct cognitive approaches to the understanding of the devel-
opment of decision making. Although the authors' perspectives
are similar in some respects, they differ in the emphases they
place on different forms of processing, the importance of different
types of information processing, and, especially, in the role that
intuitive processing plays in making adaptive decisions. Each au-
thor converges on the belief that the construction, extension,
and evaluation of developmental models of decision making is
crucial if research is to progress beyond its current, infantile state.
In chapter 1, Byrnes outlines his Self-Regulation Model (SRM)
of decision making, the role of self-regulated thinking in develop-
ment, and the importance of investigating the development of
different components of self-regulated thinking when evaluating
age differences in decision competence. Byrnes' SRM model fo-
cuses on both functional aspects of decision-making competence
(i.e., goal-setting abilities, the abilities to generate, evaluate, and
implement decision options) and structural aspects of decision

1
2 PARTI

making (e.g., a relevant and accurate knowledge base; working memory ca-
pacity) that support and sometimes constrain the utilization of decision-
making competencies. The SRM model thus shares some assumptions with
traditional competence-performance theories of cognitive development and
the "bounded rationality" theories that are currently in vogue among adult
decision theorists. More importantly, Byrnes' theory pinpoints a variety of
sources that may help explain the developmental mechanisms responsible for
age differences in decision making, as well as inter- and intra-individual vari-
ability in decision making.
The focus of Klaczynski's chapter (chap. 2) is on the role of dual process-
ing for understanding the development of reasoning and decision making. In
the dual-process theory he presents, development is conceived as occurring
in two separate information-processing systems. The "analytic" system in-
volves conscious deliberation, metacognitive reflection and monitoring of
reasoning, decontextualized task representations, and attempts to arrive at
precise, accurate inferences and decisions. By contrast, the "experiential"
system relies on processing that occurs at or below the "periphery" of con-
sciousness. This system is considered the predominant or default processing
system on most everyday reasoning and decision tasks. Klaczynski augments
his analysis of dual processing by arguing for the importance of metacognitive
functioning in normative reasoning and decision making. Specifically, a case
is made that, although contextual cues typically result in the automatic acti-
vation of heuristics and stereotypes, this preconscious activation does not
necessarily lead to preconscious implementation. Children, adolescents, and
adults have at least the opportunity to "metacognitively intercede" before
the products of experiential processing are actually applied, allowing reason-
ers to reflect on experientially produced responses and to override their im-
plementation with analytically based responses. Klaczynski suggests that this
ability increases with age, particularly around the beginning of the adolescent
period.
In the final chapter of this section, Reyna, Adam, Poirier, LeCroy, and
Brainerd (chap. 3) also propose a dual-process model of decision making and
apply this model to adolescent sexual risk taking. In their "fuzzy-trace" the-
ory, Reyna et al. argue that real-life decision making cannot be adequately
explained by traditional decision analysis. Fuzzy-trace theory thus predicts
that decisions are not based on "rational" integration of risks and rewards.
Rather, decisions are based on "gist" processing. Reyna et al. further argue
that adaptive decisions are typically made on the basis of intuitive semantic
representations (i.e., gist—the "core meaning" of a decision) that are en-
abled by experiences, culture, and development. A key assumption of fuzzy-
trace theory is that decision makers' default processing preference is to oper-
ate on the least precise representation available to accomplish particular
tasks. That is, decision makers prefer to operate in gist representations (qual-
PARTI 3

itative representations involving holistic distinctions such as "more" vs.

"less") and are disinclined to use verbatim representations (i.e., based on pre-
cise quantification of task demands). In contrast to most decision-making
theories, they argue that this "fuzzy-processing preference" increases with
age. An important difference in the conclusions of these researchers is that
effective decisions can be achieved from reliance on predominantly intuitive
processing; therefore, interventions should focus on priming and enabling in-
tuitions rather than improving the abilities required for precise, analytic
computations.
In reviewing these approaches, we note that there are numerous areas of
convergence. For example, each position highlights the idea that develop-
ment involves the acquisition of an increasingly diverse array of decision
strategies and heuristics and that decision making involves selection from
among an array of strategies that becomes increasingly complex with devel-
opment. Some divergences among the theories are also evident. For exam-
ple, Byrnes acknowledges that unconscious processes play a role in decision
making, but emphasizes conscious self-regulation, particularly in making im-
portant decisions. By contrast, Klaczynski and Reyna et al. emphasize implicit
processing. However, Reyna et al. argue that adaptive decisions are more likely
produced through implicit, "gist-level" processes; Klaczynski similarly argues
that many adaptive decisions arise from predominantly intuitive processing,
but (like Byrnes) argues that conscious regulatory mechanisms are more likely
to produce normative decisions than purely intuitive processing.
Part of what makes cognitive developmental research on decision making
interesting is that different theories sometimes make very different predic-
tions. As Byrnes suggests, the task for the future is to resolve discrepancies
both through further theoretical refinements and through additional empiri-
cal data that clearly juxtapose predictions from these different theories. With
little doubt, the future of cognitive developmental theory and research on
decision making promises exciting insights into the processes that underlie
decision making and its development.
This page intentionally left blank