Decision making
From Wikinfo
From the most general systemics perspective, decision making is the goal-oriented cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what. Therefore, decision making is a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.
Common examples include shopping, deciding what to eat, when to sleep, and deciding whom or what to vote for in an election or referendum.
Decision making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can never "see" a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore, we conclude that a psychological event that we call "decision making" has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to affect the action.
Structured, rational and introspective description of a decision making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge, preferences and available information (see: IPK model), in a given area to making decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and selecting an appropriate treatment. Some research using naturalistic methods shows, however, that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to fit a set of indicators into the expert's experience and immediately arrive at a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives.
Due to the large number of considerations involved in many decisions, computer-based decision support systems (DSS) have been developed to assist decision makers in considering the implications of various courses of thinking. They can help reduce the risk of human errors. DSSs which try to realize some human/cognitive decision making functions are called Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS), see for ex. "An Approach to the Intelligent Decision Advisor (IDA) for Emergency Managers, 1999".
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Socio-political perspective
Different sociological groups have different decision making methods. Methods which are likely to converge on a decision within a finite time interval range from dictatorship to direct democracy to consensus decision making. However, depending on how the methods are implemented in practice, any of these may lead to either no decision being made or to inconsistent decisions being made.
- Also see Medical decision making
External links
- Sources of Power: How people make decisions, -Klein, G. (1998), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
- Cognitive decision-making modeling, systemic perspective. Pages of High-Intelligence & Decision Research Group of ENEA (Italian National Research Agency)
- Society for Medical Decision Making
- How to make better decisions From MindTools.com
- Decision Theater - Helping policy makers in their decision making process through the use of visualization, simulation and collaboration tools.
- A research group on intuition & decision making
- Emotional and Decision Making Lab, Carnegie Mellon, EDM Lab
- General Morphological Analysis: A General Method for Non-Quantified Modelling From the Swedish Morphological Society
- Strategic Decision Support using Computerised Morphological Analysis
- Myers, I. (1962) Introduction to Type: A description of the theory and applications of the Myers-Briggs type indicator, Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto Ca., 1962.
- The de Borda Institute - Emerson, P J. Beyond the Tyranny of the Majority, a comparison of the more common voting procedures used in both decision making and elections.
- Decision Analysis in Health Care - An online course from George Mason University providing free lectures and tools for decision making in health care.
- Random Choice - An online tool for making random decisions.
- Cognitive Decision-Making - Interdisciplinary book about cognition and decision-making (read introduction online)
- Two-stage decision-making
Some important research journals
- Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
- Journal of Judgment and Decision Making
- Judgment and Decision Making
- Medical Decision Making
- Decision Support Systems
- European Journal of Operational Research
- Operations Research Letters
- Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
- Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Decision_making" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_making, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
