What the network is
The Cognitive Decision Chain is a loose collaboration of independent researchers and practising clinicians who share an interest in rigorous empirical study of professional judgement in psychology. It has no legal form and is neither an organisation, an institution, nor an association. Its purpose is purely intellectual: to provide a light, informal scaffold for joint seminars, open exchange of preprints, and occasional small working meetings.
The name cognitive decision chain deliberately points away from single acts of clinical judgement and toward their sequences. Professional practice is not a series of independent verdicts but a connected chain of appraisals, each forming the context of the next. Quality of practice, as we understand it, lies in the coherence of the chain rather than in the precision of any individual step.
Historical note
The study of sequential clinical judgement has a long tradition in psychology. As early as the mid-twentieth-century work of Paul Meehl, simple statistical rules were shown to outperform the intuition of experienced clinicians, and the question of why such a discrepancy exists was put on the table. Later work by Kahneman and Tversky extended the description of systematic distortions beyond clinical settings into expert judgement and decision-making under uncertainty in general. A parallel line — Schmidt and colleagues' work on medical diagnostic reasoning — showed that competent judgement rests largely on the recognition of organised patterns rather than on stepwise analytical inference.
The network claims no institutional descent from any of these schools. We are simply inspired by their methodological stance: a serious engagement with data on actual practice, scepticism toward self-report, and curiosity about what competence looks like from the inside.
How the network operates
The two nodes — Helsinki and Moscow — pursue independent research programmes, maintain a shared internal mailing list, and exchange preprints. Joint online seminars are held irregularly (on average every six to eight weeks). The network has no central office, no formal membership procedure, no shared budget, and no unified research agenda.
Coordination is kept to a minimum: agreeing on seminar topics, maintaining the preprint catalogue, and running periodic mailings. All research questions are pursued within the nodes or in small working groups assembled ad hoc around a particular topic.
Working principles
Several informal principles have crystallised over time, and we try to follow them.
No clinical work under the network's name. The network is a research and methodological format. Any practical work — psychotherapy, consultation, expert appraisal — is carried out by individual participants under their own name and within their own professional qualifications. The network does not refer clients to specialists and does not act as an intermediary.
Open preprints. Internal texts that have reached "showable to a colleague" status are by default released in the open catalogue on the Publications page. Only raw materials requiring patient or participant data protection are kept closed.
Modesty about generalisation. Most of our data come from relatively narrow contexts (Finnish-language and Russian-language clinical settings, particular models of supervision). We try not to make claims that go beyond what those data actually support.