Introduction

Welcome to Computerized Decisions!

A decision situation means that you are faced with a number of choice alternatives. You cannot choose them all. You must make a choice. Some decisions have implications for how your life will be. Shall I marry X or not? Which housing alternative should I choose to buy? Which education should I choose? Should our company invest in something or not?

Computerized Decisions is a device that will help you to make good decisions. Sometimes it is difficult to decide what is the best alternative. Sometimes decisions are made too quickly without thinking through the possible consequences of different choice alternatives. It could also happen that decision makers neglect to consider what they really think is important, and because of this they will regret the decision they make. It may also happen that you find it very difficult to sum up all advantages and disadvantages with different decision alternatives. Computerized Decisions helps you to make decision that overcome these shortcomings and problems.

Computerized Decisions suggests decisions in line with a formula based on a unique integration of well-established theories of rational decision making, and attributes of choice alternatives, as well as a new integration into the decision formula including parts of time. This is done by offering more or less specific sets of attributes with values, views, and directions, covering all kinds of decisions (personal, organizational, and political) as well as possibilities of forming own attributes that selectively could serve as guidelines in the specific decision situation. The formula and attribute inventories, are based on work from a research team since 2006. The attributes can also describe emotions, moralities, personalities, and cultures. New categorizations and descriptions with attributes of all these phenomena are presented in the Attributes section.

Computerized Decisions can be seen as a decision therapist with whom you interact in order to reach a decision that is systematically grounded in your values and in what you believe, the hopes you have and the risks you fear. You will get an overview of how your values and beliefs determine how good the choice alternatives will be if you want to make a rational decision. A rational choice follows logically from your values and beliefs and can only be changed if your values and beliefs are changed. Thus, in a rational decision you always have grounds for your decision. If you want to be rational you cannot change your decision without changing the grounds. By interacting with Computerized Decisions you can experiment with changing the grounds in a logical and systematic way and then immediately get feedback if and how the decision will change. You can do this back and forth until you feel that you feel that you have found a good ground for choosing a best alternative. You can very flexibly decide how much and which information you will use to make your decision. It is also possible to import ratings from previously stored decisions as a ground for your ratings of the actual decision situation. It is up to you all the time how much effort you will devote to your decision-making process, but Computerized Decisions makes sure that there will also be a logical connection between the grounds that you have given and the decision that you make. It is enlightening and the same time fun to interact with Computerized Decisions.

Working with Computerized Decisions involves the following steps.

Your description of the decision situation

Here you need to identify the alternatives that are at hand in the decision situation. You have the option of importing descriptions and ratings of previously stored decisions, which you can keep or modify in the actual decision situation. You are asked for each alternative to identify possible scenarios that are important for whether the alternative will be a good or bad choice (e. g., that you will be in good health or that you will get sick). You are furthermore asked to give probabilities of the scenarios. For each scenario you are asked to identify parts of time that correspond to how the scenarios may change across time e. g. (in the near future / in the more distant future) or across situations (e, g. working time time/free time). For each part of time, you are asked how long it will take in comparison to the total time of all parts of time. You can also investigate an alternative as a whole, and identify just one scenario or one part of time, which means that the decision will be made without taking different scenarios or parts of time into account.

Attribute editor with importance ratings

Here you need to select attributes (i. e., desirable goals for what you do in your life, e. g., to have control, to experience enjoyment) that are important to consider in your decisions. You are free to choose any number of and types of attributes. You will be offered suggestions of attributes that you may consider. Goodness summarizes the access to all decision values depending on their importance. Seeing the decision situation from the Self (good for self) or from Others (good for others) are two basic views. The decision values (Control, Enjoyment, Achievement, Courage) summarize the decision values seen from the self and others views, which summarize the decision values seen from the from or to self, and from or to others views. To self means that the value comes to yourself, to others that it comes to others, from self that it comes from yourself, and from others that it comes from others. These are defined as attribute inventories you can choose between, which are explained further in the Attributes section. In addition, you are free to define other values to be used in the decision. You will be asked to rate the importance of each of the attributes that you have selected.

Attribute access

Here you are asked to judge how much you think that you have reached each of the selected attributes (= access to the attributes) in comparisons to how it is now, given all combinations of choice alternative, scenario and part of time.

For example, how much access will you have to enjoyment if you stop smoking? One scenario is that you succeed. Then you have less enjoyment in the first part of time when you have abstinence, but more in the next when the abstinence is over. But it is also possible that you don’t succeed. Then you get less enjoyment during the part of time of abstinence and start to smoke again which can lead to lung cancer in a later part of time which means much less enjoyment. If you just continue to smoke it means the same enjoyment for a while and probably lung cancer in a later part of time with a lot less enjoyment.

Results

Here Computerized Decisions has used your judgments to calculate how good each alternative is, compared to now. The alternative with highest goodness scores is the recommended decision. You will also get an overview of your judgments of scenario probabilities, part of time, attribute importance and, attribute access. You are free to change any of these judgments and immediately see how the goodness scores for each alternative are changed, and if also the recommended decision will change as well how good each alternative is with respect to each of the attributes that is involved in the situation. You can also go back to earlier steps, if you want to make changes, or save the decision situation. In this way you can test how sensitive the recommended decision is to variations in the grounds on which the decision is based.

Buttons

To facilitate using the program during all its steps, it is possible to click at a number of buttons. On the top of the screen there are buttons that gives access to various pieces of information that facilitate and/or enrich the use of the program. On the bottom of the screen there are buttons for navigating between different steps of the program. Information about each button, as well as other specific help about the actual screen, can be obtained by clicking at the button Help at the top of the screen.

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