Personal Decision Making (textbook about applied decision-making, for the class I'm taking right now)

The reason the book struck me as interesting was the author is employed at the university I'm going to, so if I get stuck its possible I could go and talk to him myself, and that its based in experimental psychology / psychology of decision making research.

The "3 Secrets" the book talks about are various techniques for addressing and recognizing biases, recognizing and overcoming failures of creativity, and developing the courage necessary to make and commit to rational choices. It covers various techniques for dealing with each of these dimensions of decision making, such as forced fit and stimulus variation for creativity.

From his blurb at the uni website:

"Dr. Anderson has been teaching at Portland State University since 1968. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1957 and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from The Johns Hopkins University in 1963. His current interests are in applications of decision psychology and decision analysis to personal decision making and public policy decision making."

From the book sleeve:

"Barry F. Anderson is professor emeritus of Psychology at Portland State University. He teaches courses on Personal Decision Making,
Decision Psychology, Conflict Resolution, and Ethical Decision Making. He also publishes in the areas of cognitive psychology and judgment and decision making and consults on personal decisions and on public and private policy decisions. In The Three Secrets of Wise Decision Making he uses his many years of varied experience to bring the technology of rational decision making to the lay reader in a manner that is understandable, engaging, and readily applicable to real-life decision making."

from the website:

"As the world has become more complex and information more abundant, decisions have become more difficult. As the pace of change and the range of choice have increased, decisions have to be made more often. Yet most of us still make decisions with no more knowledge about decision processes than our ancestors had in a simpler age, hundreds of years ago.

    Mathematicians, economists, psychologists, and practitioners have developed a variety of powerful and easily applied tools for decision making. Evidence is accumulating that better decision processes lead to better outcomes and that unaided human decision processes are not good enough for many decisions. More to the present point, evidence is also accumulating that learning better decision processes can make people better decision makers in their daily lives. The Three Secrets of Wise Decision Making brings the best of the new methods to the intelligent reader.

    The Three Secrets is designed expressly to help people make better decisions. It has been repeatedly tested in a course on personal decision making. The approach of the book is unabashedly practical. Except for portions of the second chapter, the emphasis is consistently on what to do. What the second chapter does is provide a brief overview of basic cognitive processes and the ways in which they tend to limit decision quality and also a brief explanation of the basic decision aids and the ways in which each supplements basic cognitive processes to enhance rationality, creativity, or judgment—the "three secrets". Some understanding of why the techniques are needed and how they work should enable the reader to apply them with greater effectiveness and satisfaction.

    The Three Secrets is organized around the Decision Ladder, a structured array of techniques to suit all decision problems and all decision makers. The Ladder extends from largely intuitive approaches, at the bottom, to decision trees, at the top. The key rung on the Ladder is the decision table and its variants: fact tables, plusses-and-minuses value tables, and 1-to-10 value tables. In the last chapter, the decision tree is introduced as a more sophisticated way of dealing with risky decisions and sequences of decisions. It is recommended that the reader start at the bottom of the Decision Ladder when beginning work on any decision problem and work up only so far as necessary. This keeps the process of decision making from becoming more complicated than would be appropriate for either the decision problem or the decision maker.

    The Three Secrets is richly provided with examples taken from life. One of the examples, Amelia’s career decision, runs through the entire book, adding human interest and conceptual continuity."

The Blue School appears to be a neuroscience driven playgroup for children to learn about their own neuroanatomy and emotional self-regulation and are given language to describe their feelings...

"So young children at the Blue School learn about what has been called “the amygdala hijack” — what happens to their brains when they flip out. Teachers try to get children into a “toward state,” in which they are open to new ideas. Periods of reflection are built into the day for students and teachers alike, because reflection helps executive function — the ability to process information in an orderly way, focus on tasks and exhibit self-control. Last year, the curriculum guide was amended to include the term “meta-cognition”: the ability to think about thinking.

“Having language for these mental experiences gives children more chances to regulate their emotions,” said David Rock, who is a member of the Blue School’s board and a founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, a global research group dedicated to understanding the brain science of leadership.

That language is then filtered through a 6-year-old’s brain.

Miles, one of the kindergartners drawing their emotions, showed off his picture and described the battle it depicted between happiness and anger this way: “The happy fights angry, but angry gets blocked by the force field and can’t get out.” Happiness could escape through his mouth, Miles explained. But anger got trapped, turning into sadness.

With ample research showing that negative emotions impede learning while positive emotions broaden children’s attention and their ability to acquire and retain information, strategies for regulating emotions are getting more emphasis in progressive schools across the country."