ABSTRACT
Some years ago my husband and I considered joining a buyers’ syndicate to buy a house. The offer was financially attractive, but we worried about a scam. I had just completed a master’s module on the psychology of decision making, so I decided to put what I had learned to use. I opted to apply multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT), a normative model of decision making between options that differ from each other along several dimensions, or attributes (see Baron, 2008, for a review). MAUT consists of breaking down the alternatives to their constituent attributes (e.g. location, price, design), assigning a weight to each attribute according to its subjective importance, estimating its utility, then summing the weighted utilities along the list of attributes. Of course, MAUT is computationally intractable to work out in one’s head, but it is perfectly manageable with the extended mind (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), the idea that cognitive processes extend beyond the body into the world. In this case, my extended mind consisted of pencil and paper and a pocket calculator. I sat down and drew a long list of attributes, complete with weights and utilities, then dutifully summed up the weighted utilities.
