Decision making

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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.

External links

Some important research journals


References

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