Naturalistic Decision Making

What is decision making? Given some set of options, pick one. How is it studied? –Give people sets of options, let them pick one. –How is the set of options constructed? –What leads to satisfaction with the choice? –Do people make good decisions? What does this say about how people really make decisions?

Kinds of decisions What kinds of decisions do we make?

Kinds of decisions Buying a car Buying food Buying a home What to do on a Saturday night What to do for a living. How are these decisions made?

How are decisions made? Do naturalistic decisions look like decisions made in lab situations? –Novice decision makers choose from among a set of options –Novice decision makers compare options Expert decision making is often different

Expert Decision Making Decisions from memory –Do what you did last time Recognition-primed decision making (Klein) –Studies of complex domains –Options considered one-at-a-time –Mental simulation is employed

Formation of consideration sets How is the set of options selected? –In a store? What store should one go to? –Generating a consideration set from memory –How does this differ for different kinds of decisions? Buying a car Buying a home Buying a toaster Buying a stick of gum

Goals and sets of options For some kinds of decisions, the goal and the set of options evolve together –What are you going to do after college? –Options are often considered sequentially Like recognition-primed decision making

What does this say about the lab? How can we make the lab more like the real world? Laboratory studies often look at “party games” –Participants are taken out of what they normally do –Questions are not perceived as being that natural –Should it be surprising that we sometimes see strange behavior in laboratory studies? So, what can we do?