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Why do presidents and their advisors often make sub-optimal decisions on military intervention, escalation, de-escalation, and termination of conflicts? The leading concept of group dynamics, groupthink, offers one explanation: policy-making groups make sub-optimal decisions due to their desire for conformity and uniformity over dissent, leading to a failure to consider other relevant possibilities. But presidential advisory groups are often fragmented and divisive. This book therefore scrutinizes polythink, a group decision-making dynamic whereby different members in a decision-making unit espouse a plurality of opinions and divergent policy prescriptions, resulting in a disjointed decision-making process or even decision paralysis. The book analyzes eleven national security decisions, including the national security policy designed prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the decisions to enter into and withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2007 \"surge\" decision, the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program, the UN Security Council decision on the Syrian Civil War, the faltering Kerry Peace Process in the Middle East, and the U.S. decision on military operations against ISIS. Based on the analysis of these case studies, the authors address implications of the polythink phenomenon, including prescriptions for avoiding and/or overcoming it, and develop strategies and tools for what they call Productive Polythink. The authors also show the applicability of polythink to business, industry, and everyday decisions.

What governs the way in which people work together and handle technology in high risk environments? The understanding of decision making, communication and the other dimensions of team interaction within aircrews and other teams in highly stressful situations, is based on a multitude of diverse factors, each with its own literature and individual studies. This book is about how teams function in just such situations, providing a uniquely integrated and interdisciplinary account of the dynamics and main explanatory factors of team interaction under high workload. The book stems from the interdisciplinary research project 'Group Interaction in High Risk Environments' (GIHRE), a Collegium of the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation. The goals of the project, and therefore the book, are to investigate, analyze and understand the behavior of professional groups working in high risk environments and to develop practical suggestions for enhancing performance. A central focus of this book is how groups in these professions deal with the factors that can threaten the safety and effectiveness of their task performance, whether these factors are part of the environment or part of the team itself. Four representative workplaces were investigated in three broad settings: in aviation, the cockpit of a commercial airliner; in medicine, the operating room and the intensive care unit of a hospital; in nuclear power, the control room of a nuclear power plant. The international and interdisciplinary composition of the Collegium ensures the book features a variety of different methodological and conceptual approaches, which are brought to bear at both theoretical and practical levels. Readers working in all related fields will find value in the case descriptions, the academic synthesis of the similarities between them, and ways to approach new challenges; specialists in applied psychology, human factors and technical management will gain new insights. Professor Rainer Dietrich heads the Psycho-linguistic Experimental Laboratory of the Institute for German Language and Linguistics at the Humboldt University Berlin, Faculty of Arts II and has conducted a number of experiments on language processing. The specific objective of the latter is the structure of the production system and the time course of utterance production under conditions of workload. Traci Michelle Childress currently works as Co-ordinator for the GIHRE project at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany and as a freelance editor and writer. Contents: Introduction, Rainer Dietrich and Traci M. Childress. Part I: Seven Perspectives on Teamwork: Group interaction under threat and high workload, Robert L. Helmreich and J. Bryan Sexton; Behavioral markers in analyzing team performance of cockpit crews, Ruth Häusler, Barbara Klampfer, Andrea Amacher and Werner Naef; The effects of different forms of co-ordination on coping with workload, Gudela Grote, Enikö Zala-Mezö and Patrick Grommes; Communication in nuclear power plants (NPP), Ryoko Fukuda and Oliver Sträter; Linguistic factors, Manfred Krifka, Silka Martens and Florian Schwarz; Language processing, Rainer Dietrich, Patrick Grommes and Sascha Neuper; Task load and the microstructure of cognition, Werner Sommer, Annette Hohlfeld and Jörg Sangals. Part II: Specific Issues: Setting the stage: characteristics of organizations, teams and tasks influencing team processes, Gudela Grote, Robert L. Helmreich, Oliver Sträter, Ruth Häusler, Enikö Zala-Mezö and J. Bryan Sexton; Structural features of language and language use, Manfred Krifka; Leadership and co-ordination, J. Bryan Sexton, Patrick Grommes, Enikö Zala-Mezö, Gudela Grote, Robert L. Helmreich and Ruth Häusler; Determinants of effective communication, Rainer Dietrich; Task load effects on language processing; experimental approaches, Annette Hohlfeld, Ryoko Fukuda, Sascha Neuper, Jörg Sangals, Werner Sommer and Oliver Sträter, Appendices; Bibliography; Index.

The Origins of Collective Decision Making, identifies three paradigms of collective decision making - Counsel, Majority and Consensus, and discovers their origins in traditional, medieval and modern times, and traces their evolution over centuries up to the current juncture.

In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the American response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. That response was informed by hours of discussions between John F. Kennedy and his top advisers. What those advisers did not know was that President Kennedy was secretly taping their talks, providing future scholars with a rare inside look at high-level political deliberation in a moment of crisis.Talk at the Brinkis the first book to examine these historic audio recordings from a sociological perspective. It reveals how conversational practices and dynamics shaped Kennedy's perception of the options available to him, thereby influencing his decisions and ultimately the outcome of the crisis. David Gibson looks not just at the positions taken by Kennedy and his advisers but how those positions were articulated, challenged, revised, and sometimes ignored. He argues that Kennedy's decisions arose from the intersection of distant events unfolding in Cuba, Moscow, and the high seas with the immediate conversational minutia of turn-taking, storytelling, argument, and justification. In particular, Gibson shows how Kennedy's group told and retold particular stories again and again, sometimes settling upon a course of action only after the most frightening consequences were omitted or actively suppressed. Talk at the Brinkpresents an image of Kennedy's response to the Cuban missile crisis that is sharply at odds with previous scholarship, and has important implications for our understanding of decision making, deliberation, social interaction, and historical contingency.

The Probabilistic Hesitant Fuzzy Sets (PHFS) based on the hesitant fuzzy sets has been paid great attention. Though numerous methods have been applied in this environment since the PHFS has been introduced, there are still new fields to be explored. The EDAS method which is the abbreviation of the evaluation based on distance from average solution is one of the practical methods in circumstances which is with contradictory attributes. Considering the uncertain character of the PHF condition and the psychological factors which influence decision makers’ behaviors such as the character and risk reference, the probabilistic hesitant fuzzy EDAS integrating with cumulative prospect theory (PHF-CPT-EDAS) is built for multiple attributes group decision making (MAGDM) problem. Meanwhile, the information of entropy is also utilized to calculate the unknown weighting vector of attributes. At last, we utilize two case studies to compare the designed method with other MADM methods. Through this article, we learn that the PHF-CPT-EDAS method is effective and stable to solve the MAGDM issues.

Effective shared decision-making between patients and physicians is crucial for enhancing health care quality and reducing medical errors. The literature shows that the absence of effective methods to facilitate shared decision-making can result in poor patient engagement and unfavorable decision outcomes. In this paper, we propose a Collaborative Decision Description Language (CoDeL) to model shared decision-making between patients and physicians, offering a theoretical foundation for studying various shared decision scenarios. CoDeL is based on an extension of the interaction protocol language of Lightweight Social Calculus. The language utilizes speech acts to represent the attitudes of shared decision-makers toward decision propositions, as well as their semantic relationships within dialogues. It supports interactive argumentation among decision makers by embedding clinical evidence into each segment of decision protocols. Furthermore, CoDeL enables personalized decision-making, allowing for the demonstration of characteristics such as persistence, critical thinking, and openness. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through a case study of shared decision-making in the disease domain of atrial fibrillation. Our experimental results show that integrating the proposed language with GPT can further enhance its capabilities in interactive decision-making, improving interpretability. The proposed novel CoDeL can enhance doctor-patient shared decision-making in a rational, personalized, and interpretable manner.

Facilitation of suitable accommodation for different travellers is the prime concern of travel agencies. Travel agencies must keep themselves competitive and sustain a good pace of growth to continue raising profits by attracting and retaining as many tourists as possible through meeting their various prospective needs. To achieve this, the agencies must prepare well-organised data for hotels and destinations from a quality control perspective. Initially, the hotels are ranked and evaluated according to performance across several criteria from the tourists' viewpoint. The relative importance of each criterion is mainly subjective and depends on the assessor's judgement. Additionally, hotels' rankings vary across different websites, resulting in inconsistencies. To handle such inconsistencies and subjectivity, this paper presents a collective decision-making evaluation framework by integrating a weighted interval rough number (WIRN) method and a WIRN-based complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) model to evaluate and rank hotels. An empirical example and a real-world case study from the Indian tourism industry are presented to validate the applicability of the proposed framework. Finally, a comparison and sensitivity analysis are performed to examine the validity and robustness of the proposed model.