Jonathan Baron

Beginning with its first edition and through subsequent editions, Thinking and Deciding has established itself as the required text and important reference work for students and scholars of human cognition and rationality. In this, the fourth edition, Jonathan Baron retains the comprehensive attention to the key questions addressed in the previous editions - How should we think? What, if anything, keeps us from thinking that way? How can we improve our thinking and decision making? - and his expanded treatment of topics such as risk, utilitarianism, Baye's theorem, and moral thinking. With the student in mind, the fourth edition emphasizes the development of an understanding of the fundamental concepts in judgment and decision making. This book is essential reading for students and scholars in judgment and decision making and related fields, including psychology, economics, law, medicine, and business.

Thinking and Deciding

Argues that applied bioethics should embrace utilitarian decision analysis, thus avoiding recommendations expected to do more harm than good.

Against Bioethics

The fifth edition of the classic text Thinking and Deciding updates the broad overview of the field of judgments and decisions offered in previous editions. It covers the normative standards used to evaluate conclusions, such as logic, probability, and various forms of utility theory. It explains descriptive accounts of departures from these standards, largely in terms of principles of cognitive psychology, emphasizing the distinction between search processes and inferences. Chapters cover decisions under risk, decision analysis, moral decisions and social dilemmas, and decisions about the future. Although the book assumes no particular prerequisites beyond introductory high-school algebra, it is most suited to advanced undergraduates, early graduate students, and active researchers in related fields, such as business, politics, law, medicine, economics, and philosophy.

Argues that applied bioethics should embrace utilitarian decision analysis, thus avoiding recommendations expected to do more harm than good. Governments, health professionals, patients, research institutions, and research subjects look to bioethicists for guidance in making important decisions about medical treatment and research. And yet, argues Jonathan Baron in Against Bioethics, applied bioethics lacks the authority of a coherent guiding theory and is based largely on intuitive judgments. Baron proposes an alternative, arguing that bioethics could have a coherent theory based on utilitarianism and decision analysis. Utilitarianism holds that the best option is the one that does the most expected good. Decision analysis provides a way of thinking about the risks and trade-offs of specific options. Like economics, utilitarian decision analysis makes predictions of expected good in complex situations, using data when possible, and focusing human judgment on the issues relevant to consequences. With such a guiding theory, bioethics would never yield decisions that clearly go against the expected good of those involved, as some do now. Baron discusses issues in bioethics that can be illuminated by such analysis, including "enhancements" to nature in the form of genetics, drugs, and mind control; reproduction; death and end-of-life issues, including advance directives, euthanasia, and organ donation; coercion and consent; conflict of interest and the reform of internal review boards; and drug research. Although Baron opposes current practice in bioethics, he argues that by combining utilitarianism and decision analysis, bioethics can achieve its aims of providing authoritative guidance in resolving thorny medical and ethical issues.

Yuelin Li

This book is written for behavioral scientists who want to consider adding R to their existing set of statistical tools, or want to switch to R as their main computation tool. The authors aim primarily to help practitioners of behavioral research make the transition to R. The focus is to provide practical advice on some of the widely-used statistical methods in behavioral research, using a set of notes and annotated examples. The book will also help beginners learn more about statistics and behavioral research. These are statistical techniques used by psychologists who do research on human subjects, but of course they are also relevant to researchers in others fields that do similar kinds of research. The authors emphasize practical data analytic skills so that they can be quickly incorporated into readers’ own research.

Behavioral Research Data Analysis with R

People often follow intuitive principles of decision making, ranging from group loyalty to the belief that nature is benign. But instead of using these principles as rules of thumb, we often treat them as absolutes and ignore the consequences of following them blindly. In Judgment Misguided, Jonathan Baron explores our well-meant and deeply felt personal intuitions about what is right and wrong, and how they affect the public domain. Baron argues that when these intuitions are valued in their own right, rather than as a means to another end, they often prevent us from achieving the results we want. Focusing on cases where our intuitive principles take over public decision making, the book examines some of our most common intuitions and the ways they can be misused. According to Baron, we can avoid these problems by paying more attention to the effects of our decisions. Written in a accessible style, the book is filled with compelling case studies, such as abortion, nuclear power, immigration, and the decline of the Atlantic fishery, among others, which illustrate a range of intuitions and how they impede the public's best interests. Judgment Misguided will be important reading for those involved in public decision making, and researchers and students in psychology and the social sciences, as well as everyone looking for insight into the decisions that affect us all.

Intuition and Error in Public Decision Making

Judgment Misguided

Max H. Bazerman

Katherine Shonk

Six Barriers to Effective Government

You Can't Enlarge the Pie

Rationality and Intelligence develops and justifies a prescriptive theory of rational thinking in terms of utility theory and the theory of rational life plans. The prescriptive theory, buttressed by other assumptions, suggests that people generally think too little and in a way that is insufficiently critical of the initial possibilities that occur to them.

Jonathan Baron

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