| Published in Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 14 (1975), 257-263 The Use of the Decomposition Principle in Making Judgments (2008) | |||||||||||||
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| One hundred and fifty-one subjects were randomly divided into two groups of roughly equal size. One group was asked to respond to a decomposed version of a problem and the other group was presented with the direct form of the problem. The results provided support for the hypotheses that people can make better judgments when they use the principle of decomposition; and that decomposition is especially valuable for those problems where the subject knows little. The results suggest that accuracy may be improved if the subject provides the data and the computer analyzes it, than if both steps were done implicitly by the subjects. One of the basic notions behind the scientific method is that a problem should be explicitly "decomposed " or broken down into a series of subproblems. Solutions are then obtained for each subproblem, and these solutions are combined as described by Raiffa (1968, p. 271): The spirit of decision analysis is to divide and conquer: Decompose a complex problem into simpler problems, get one's thinking straight in these simpler problems, paste these analyses together with a logical glue... Polya (1948) provided a general discussion on the use of decomposition in problem solving and Hertz (1964) | |||||||||||||
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