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1998
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Bowling Green Pastures Michael Doherty
June 1 brought my formal retirement from Bowling Green. In the past year, a student, Greg Brake, completed his PhD dissertation, in which Brunswikian principles were brought to bear on calibration research. His results were consistent with the easy-hard effect, but the lens model approach allowed an independent specification of task difficulty. This is, to my knowledge, the first time that difficulty has been specified independently of percent correct. Part of Greg's dissertation research used a baseball domain, as did the work he presented last year, and found elegant underconfidence on games that were relatively predictable, and overconfidence (not as cleanly) on the harder games. He also used the prediction of roommates in an additional calibration task. In that study, the students showed bias (most of the data curve under the leading diagonal) Difficulty in both domains was operationalized as Re. A paper that Ken Shemberg and I gave as a poster at JDM in Chicago was accepted for publication in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. In that paper we tried a framing manipulation to bias diagnostic judgments of 136 practicing clinicians. The Brunswikian aspect of the paper was the care given to object sampling, in that we used 9 different target descriptions. The clinicians were affected by the biasing question format, but in a pretty sensible way; they were much less likely to assent to the extreme diagnosis of psychopathology than the less extreme (more common) "psychologically unhealthy." We (Greg Brake and Dave Slegers) are continuing the effort to generalize Gigerenzer's fast and frugal model. We are scheduled to present this work at Psychonomics. We (Jack Mynatt and I) finally finished an Intro book, after many years. It will dismay Ken and other members of this society to see us pay so much attention to classical design and single variable studies, but at least we have included a critique of classical design from an explicitly Brunswikian perspective. In Ken's marvelous 1966 opening chapter, he indicted Intro books as one of the reasons that representative design has not had a higher profile, but I do not see how one could present the current state of psychology for INTRODUCTORY students right out of high school from a Brunswikian point of view. Perhaps a younger member of the society might take on such a task with a much fresher perspective. I look forward to seeing you all in Dallas....... (Mary-delete this sentence from printed newsletter) |
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