Overview
The Cognitive Decision Chain is an informal professional network of researchers and practitioners in clinical and professional psychology, brought together by a shared interest in the sequential nature of decision-making in psychotherapy, clinical assessment, and expert consultation. The name reflects a structural view of clinical judgement as a chain of interlocking appraisals and diagnostic steps, in which each later decision rests on earlier ones and constrains the next.
The network operates as two independent nodes — one in Helsinki, one in Moscow — with no formal academic affiliation. The Helsinki node focuses on the empirical study of clinical judgement among practising psychotherapists: how an experienced clinician forms a working case formulation, how that formulation is revised as new information accumulates, which systematic distortions characterise serial appraisals, and how professional supervision shapes the quality of unfolding decisions.
Research themes
Sequential clinical judgement
How a practising psychotherapist forms, revises, and confirms a working case formulation across multiple sessions. Particular attention is paid to moments at which the clinician encounters disconfirming information, and to the strategies — Bayesian updating, hypothesis discarding, holding uncertainty — that are actually used as opposed to those nominally endorsed.
Systematic distortions in expert appraisal
Anchoring on first impressions, illusory correlation, confirmation bias, the influence of affective tone on substantive interpretation. The applied focus is on distortions to which seasoned practitioners — rather than novices — are most vulnerable, and on conditions under which experience works against decision quality rather than for it.
Decision support in supervision
Structured formats for case discussion — diagnostic vignettes, counterfactual modelling, formalised decision maps — and their effect on inter-rater agreement between supervisor and supervisee. Comparison of supervisory traditions (psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural, integrative) in terms of which cognitive operations they actually train, as opposed to those they claim to train.
Ethics of unfolding decisions
Models of informed consent that are revisited as therapy progresses rather than treated as a one-off event. A separate strand looks at boundary situations — therapist as expert as researcher — in which individually justifiable decisions can compose into a problematic trajectory across the chain.
A full list of active questions and current working notes is on the Research page.
Format in brief
The network has no legal status. It is not a clinic, a training centre, or a professional association. The two nodes maintain a shared internal mailing list, exchange preprints, and occasionally hold joint online seminars. The network does not provide external services; requests for consultation, training, or psychotherapy are not accepted and are not redirected.