Reading :: Decision Making in Action

Decision Making in Action: Models and Methods
Edited by Gary A. Klein, Judith Orasanu, Roberta Calderwood, and Caronline E. Zsambok

Recently I reviewed an edited collection on naturalistic decision making (NDM) that resulted from the Second Naturalistic Decision Making Conference in 1994. This edited collection similarly comes from a 1989 workshop and is edited by some of the same people. Its goal was "to describe naturalistic decision making" and its four key features: "dynamic and continually changing conditions, real-time reactions to these changes, ill-defined goals and ill-structured tasks, and knowledgeable people"; the collection presents "models and methods pertaining to these four features" (p.vii). Importantly, NDM emphasizes ecological research (p.vii).

The book has five sections: overview/background, NDM paradigms, methodology, applications, and evaluations. I will just overview a few chapters in the first section.

In Section A, Chapter 1, Judith Orasanu and Terry Connolly discuss the fact that traditional decision making research has focused on the "decision event," in which one decision maker chooses among known, fixed alternatives (p.5). In contrast, the authors argue that "decision performance in everyday situations is a joint function of two factors: (1) features of the task and (2) the subject's knowledge and experience relevant to that task" (p.7). They list 8 factors of NDM:

1. "Ill-structured problems"
2. "Uncertain, dynamic environments"
3. "Shifting, ill-defined, or competing goals"
4. "Action/feedback loops"
5. "Time stress"
6. "High stakes"
7. "Multiple players"
8. "Organizational goals and norms" (p.7)

The authors emphasize that NDM happens within a "decision cycle," which "reflects the incomplete knowledge, dynamically changing conditions, and competing goal structures that characterize NDM situations" (p.19).

In Chapter 3, Marvin Cohen describes three paradigms on decision making: formal-empiricist, rationalist, and naturalistic. He compares these based on criteria of normative evaluation, style of psychological modeling, and style of empirical observation (p.43). In comparing these, Cohen ends up leveling some sharp critiques of Kahneman-type decision bias claims (e.g., p.82). 

In Chapter 5, Raanan Lipshitz overviews decision making models, including Klein's Recognition-Primed Decisions (RPD) model. She compares these in detail—a very useful chapter, since most of these make appearances in the same order in later chapters.

As someone who is new to NDM, I appreciated the overviews and broad strokes. NDM went on to be popularized in Klein's later books, but here we see some early work contrasting with the then-dominant views of decision making. If you're interested in NDM, yes, check this collection out.