Skip to main content

Decision Making

In Psychology, decision making can be regarded as problem solving activity yielding a solution deemed to be optimal or at least satisfactory. It is therefore a process which can be more or less rational or irrational based on explicit or tacit knowledge and beliefs. Tacit knowledge is often used to fill the gaps in complex decision making processes. Usually both of these types of knowledge, explicit and tacit, are used in the decision making process.

A major part of decision making involves the analysis of a finite set of alternatives described in terms of evaluative criteria. Then the task might be to rank these alternatives in terms of how attractive they are to the decision maker(s) when all the criteria are considered simultaneously.


Solving such a problem is the focus of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis or MCDA. This area of decision making, although old, has attracted the interest of many researchers and practitioners and is still highly debated as there are many MCDA methods which may yield very different results when they are applied on exactly the same data. This leads to the formulation of the decision making paradox.

On the other hand, Logical decision making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to make informed decisions. For example, medical decision making often involves a diagnosis and the selection of the appropriate treatment.

But naturalistic decision making research shows that in situations with higher time pressure, high stakes or increased ambiguities, experts may use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches. They may follow a recognition primed decision that fits their experience and arrive at  a course of action without weighing alternatives.

x----x

This post is brought to you by Nestlé.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Create a Richly Imagined World

For someone who likes fantasy and sci-fi fiction, most of the time, a lot of people ask me about how to create a richly imagined world. Fantasy and sci-fi elements rest heavily on how an author weave the setting and the world in which the heroes dwell in, and it helps to make the novel to be imagined vividly in the readers' minds. A convincing world should be relatable, something that we can associate ourselves with. For us to be associated with a world an author created in his mind, and wrote on the pages of a book, this world has to be close to the real thing. It has to be systematic, real and alive, and very convincing. A real world has certain elements, and an author must consider them in writing a vividly imagined world: Cartography - a fantasy or sci-fi world depend heavily on geography and maps, especially if the plot requires war and the belligerents occupy so much space in the plot. A convincing world has the world separated in territories, and every part of the...

Simple Machine

A simple machine is a mechanical device that changes the direction or magnitude of a force. In general, they can be defined as the simplest mechanisms that use mechanical advantage (also called leverage) to multiply force. Usually the term refers to the six classical simple machines that were defined by Renaissance scientists: Lever Wheel and axle Pulley Inclined plane Wedge Screw A simple machine uses a single applied force to do work against a single work load. Ignoring friction losses, the work done on the load is equal to the work done by the applied force. The machine can increase the amount of the output force, at the cost of a proportional decrease in the distance moved by the load. The ratio of the output to the applied force is called the mechanical advantage. Simple machines can be regarded as the elementary "building blocks" of which all more complicated machines (sometimes called compound machines) are composed. For example, wheels, levers, and pulleys are all use...

Crusades

 The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to conquer Jerusalem and its surrounding areas from Muslim rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organized, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. Crusading declined rapidly after the 15th century. In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the first expedition at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe there was an enthusiastic response. Participants came from all over Europe and had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations,...