Decision Making: A Cognitive Science Perspective

This chapter overviews topics in judgment and decision making from a cognitive science perspective. It advocates a “closed-loop” view” of decision making: an interactive and continuous dynamic process of exchanges between humans and their environment. The chapter first discusses the “open-loop” view of decision making that has dominated the field for many decades, beginning with a historical perspective on rationality and bounded rationality to distinguish the closed and open loop views and the research from two major fields that study decision making: economics and psychology. It then presents foundational research for the closed-loop view that involves probability learning and dynamic decision making, adaptive decision making, and recent research on dynamic decision making and decisions from experience. The last section presents the naturalistic decision-making perspective and its connections to cognitive engineering and human factors. It concludes with a view on future research at individual, team, group, and societal levels.