I get the “normative” jargon from Baron’s Thinking and Deciding. In studies of decision making you can roughly break the work down into three categories; descriptive, normative and prescriptive.
The first consists of studying how people actually think; that’s typically the work of the Kahneman and Tverskys of the field.
The second consists of identifying what rules must hold if decisions are to satisfy some desirable properties; for instance Expected Utility is normative in evaluating known alternatives, Probability Theory is normative in assessing probabilities (and even turns out to be normative in comparing scientific hypotheses).
The third is about what we can do to bring our thinking in line with some normative framework. “You should compute the Expected Utility of all your options and pick the highest valued one” may not be an appropriate prescription, for instance if you are in a situation where you have many options but too little time to consciously work out utilities; or in a situation where you have too few options and should instead work on figuring out additional options.
This might be worth writing up as a top-level post for future reference and further discussion.
I get the “normative” jargon from Baron’s Thinking and Deciding. In studies of decision making you can roughly break the work down into three categories; descriptive, normative and prescriptive.
The first consists of studying how people actually think; that’s typically the work of the Kahneman and Tverskys of the field.
The second consists of identifying what rules must hold if decisions are to satisfy some desirable properties; for instance Expected Utility is normative in evaluating known alternatives, Probability Theory is normative in assessing probabilities (and even turns out to be normative in comparing scientific hypotheses).
The third is about what we can do to bring our thinking in line with some normative framework. “You should compute the Expected Utility of all your options and pick the highest valued one” may not be an appropriate prescription, for instance if you are in a situation where you have many options but too little time to consciously work out utilities; or in a situation where you have too few options and should instead work on figuring out additional options.
This might be worth writing up as a top-level post for future reference and further discussion.