Links to the Information Processing Approach

As the aim of this research was to explore social workers’ decision-making with an Information Processing Approach framework (Payne & Bettman, 2004), it is important to consider how the findings and answers to the research questions relate to this.

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A detailed description of the Information Processing Approach (Payne & Bettman, 2004) can be found in Chapter 4 of this Volume. Table 8 below highlights the key elements of this approach and how the findings of this study relate to these.

Key element Findings from present study

Humans are highly selective about what information they pay attention to when making decisions.

Section 7.2.1 shows the particular pieces of information that social workers attended to when making decisions. Constraints in the environment influence

human decision-making.

Section 7.2.2 highlights the constraints that influenced the social workers’ decision-making.

Human decision-making is influenced by the environment, including the influence of other people.

Section 7.2.3 illustrates the range of other people that influenced the decisions made by the social workers. Humans have limited capacity to make

decisions and often rely on heuristics to aid their decision-making, particularly when making complex decisions.

Section 7.2.4 shows some of the heuristics that social workers relied on when making decisions regarding the placement of siblings, which can be considered a complex decision.

Table 8. Key elements of the Information Processing Approach (Payne & Bettman, 2004) and links with the findings of the present study.

The findings from the present study support the Information Processing Approach (Payne & Bettman, 2004) as a good explanation of how social workers make decisions regarding the placement of siblings. Research has shown that humans are selective about what information they pay attention to when making decisions, and the findings of the present study also reflects this. For example, Payne and Bettman (2004) suggest that humans’ attention is often unconsciously directed to certain pieces of information, particularly when faced with complex decisions, due to our limited attentional capacity. The social workers did show selective attention in the present study; for example, they did tend to focus on particular aspects of the sibling relationship in the vignettes when making decisions, and also when responding to the interview questions. However, it is unclear from the present study whether this was

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an ‘unconscious’ process; it seemed that the social workers may have been purposefully selecting which pieces of the information to focus on.

The present study has also highlighted a range of constraints that influenced the social workers’ decision-making. This also relates to previous studies that have utilised an Information Processing Approach (Payne & Bettman, 2004). For example, the present study found that the social workers’ own emotions affected their decision- making. Luce, Payne and Bettman (2000) asked participants to make a choice between two alternatives in an experimental setting, and found that humans often make decisions that help them to avoid experiencing negative emotions. The findings from the present study appear to support this assertion in relation to real-life decision-making. Payne and Bettman (2004) also report that human decision-making is bounded by constraints in the environment. The findings of the present study, relating to systemic constraints that influenced the social workers’ decision-making, are in line with previous research that have identified similar constraints, such as paperwork, bureaucracy and high workloads (Randall et al., 2000).

Both the present study and previous research from a wide range of disciplines have suggested that other people can influence an individual’s decision-making in a variety of different contexts. For example, previous research has suggested that Wall Street analysts are influenced by other people (Rao, Greve & Davis, 2001); individuals also make decisions based on what other people are doing in recreational avalanche accidents (McCammon, 2002); and the influence of others is also evident in a study of gambling habits in Las Vegas (Griskevicius et al., 2009). Thus, the findings from

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the present study support the notion that humans are influenced by other people when making decisions, and also provides support for the social proof heuristic (McCammon, 2002).

The findings from the present study suggest that social workers may rely on a range of heuristics to aid their decision-making. This has also been illustrated in a range of other studies that have explored complex decision-making. For example, Newell and Shanks (2003) demonstrated in an experimental design study that individuals makes use of the take-the-best heuristic, particularly the cost of information was high. This related to the present study, where social workers may have relied on the take-the- best heuristic when there were particularly negative factors in a sibling relationship, such as where there was a safeguarding concern.

However, evidence of one of the heuristics (the priority heuristic) was not found within the present study. This heuristic involves the decision-maker going through the options and choosing the option that gives the maximum gain (Brandstätter et al., 2006). Within the present study, it may be that the decision – whether to place siblings together or apart – has no option that would clearly give ‘maximum gain’. The research regarding outcomes for siblings placed together compared with those placed apart is mixed (Hegar, 2005), suggesting that this is a complex area for which there is often no simple answer. This could explain why the use of the priority heuristic in decision-making was not supported in this study.

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In summary, it seems that social workers’ decision-making is influenced by constraints, both in their own capacity and in the environment, by other people and by which particular pieces of information they pay attention to. Social workers may also rely on heuristics, or simplification mechanisms, to aid their decision-making, particularly when under pressure due to restricted timescales for the decision to be made and their often high workload.