VOLUME 30 , NUMBER 5 May 1999
Decision researchers split, but prolific
While some criticize lab work on how people make decisions as irrelevant
to the real world, others find value in old theories.
By Beth Azar
APA Monitor staff
Over the past decade, a rift has developed in the branch of psychology that studies
judgment and decision-making.
Some researchers have broken away from the traditional experimental model of
studying decision-making and have shifted to more qualitative methods to examine
decision-making as it happens to people in real-life--from military commanders to
neonatal nurses to nuclear power plant operators. Members of this self-described
"movement," called Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), have criticized traditional
lab-based research, saying its theories are useless in natural settings.
In contrast, the "traditionalists" say they have found much to draw on from the early
lab work, which largely evaluated people's abilities to judge probabilities in
gambling-type situations. In fact, they're using what they've learned as they, too,
expand their work to include more real-life types of decisions--from a jury's ruling on
punitive damages to an adolescent's decision to use condoms.
Despite the tensions between the two branches of decision research, a rich body of
science continues to flow from both. And, most researchers believe the two will
eventually coexist peacefully, if not begin to collaborate.
Indeed, one of decision research's old guard, Princeton University's Daniel
Kahneman, PhD, says he has long been a fan of researcher Gary Klein's early studies
of firefighters, which inspired NDM. He even says, "they are absolutely right that
they should not be looking at what we do for help in what they do."
"But," he adds, "the idea that they have a monopoly on studying the real world is
unfounded. We're simply studying different pieces of the real world."
Indeed, a main distinction between the two types of research is that NDM tends to
focus on expert, tactical decision-making of the sort that a tank commander makes on
the job and under pressure. In contrast, traditionalists have applied their research most
successfully to situations that provide more opportunity to deliberate and less
opportunity to acquire skill--choosing an investment or medical plan, or deciding
whether to support a nuclear power plant in the neighborhood.
NDM researchers' antagonism has, in large part, been rhetoric designed to establish
their approach as a distinct field, says psychologist Lee Roy Beach, PhD, vice dean of
business and public administration at the University of Arizona, who feels his work
belongs in both camps.
"If you're going to change things, sometimes you have to put your foot somewhere to
press down," he says.
Online decision-making
Klein, a leader of the NDM movement, has stepped on a few toes in promoting the
breakaway field. He's proclaimed that the best way to understand how people make
decisions is by studying them in natural settings. He's also criticized traditional
researchers for emphasizing decision-makers' limitations--for example, how
misperceptions of the probability of an event can lead to erroneous decisions. Instead,
as chief scientist and founder of the research and consulting firm Klein Associates,
Inc., in Fairborn, Ohio, he has concentrated on strengths that expert decision-makers
bring to their jobs--particularly in the heat of making a decision.
Klein bases much of his work on a theory of decision-making he developed through
his early studies of fire ground-commanders--people in charge of putting out urban
and suburban fires. The theory states that people make decisions based on experience.
Rather than coming up with several alternatives, then weighing them against each
other, experts recognize a situation as similar to ones they've seen before and then
choose the action that best fits the situation. This "recognition-primed decisionmaking (RPD)," as Klein calls it, also helps people recognize anomalies more quickly
and assess the underlying dynamics even in unusual situations, he says.
One fire ground-commander, for example, pulled his men out of a house just minutes
before the floor collapsed. When first questioned, he couldn't say how he knew to
evacuate--there were no overt signs of imminent danger. But on further questioning
by Klein and his colleagues, the commander realized that the situation seemed odd to
him, the fire was behaving unlike anything he'd experienced, so he pulled out to
regroup.
It's not just veterans who use the technique, says Klein.
"The research shows that the theory generalizes to different domains--even those
without times pressure," he says. "Real novices are stuck trying to figure out what
their options are but they quickly move up the ladder. Once they gain any experience
with the task, they start to see that there are different features that are important and
times when a certain course of action makes sense."
Image theory
Arizona's Beach isn't surprised that Klein's RPD model generalizes, but he isn't sure
that what Klein is looking at constitutes decision-making per se. Instead, it may better
describe a general model of learning, Beach says--using experience to make future
behavior more automatic.
Beach also disagrees with Klein and others who argue that the real world is the best
place to study true-to-life decision-making. He, like a growing cadre of researchers,
studies realistic decision-making, but in the control of the laboratory. For example, he
may give students data about prospective employers and examine how they decide
with whom to take a job.
"I think I fall somewhere in the middle" between NDM purists and traditionalists, he
says. "I agree that we have to move away from simplistic models that take intuition
and emotion out of decision-making, but the laboratory can provide some interesting
findings."
Beach has formed his own theory of decision-making called "Image Theory," which
argues that decisions are not discrete events but are an integral part of the ongoing
flow of life. Three main aspects of a person's life influence his or her decisions: the
person's enduring beliefs and values; the person's agenda and goals; and the person's
plans for attaining goals.
For most decisions, people easily narrow their options by screening them through
their values--certain options will be precluded because they're morally unacceptable.
For example, for most people, if they need money, robbing a bank won't even enter
their minds. Their value image screens it out, says Beach. People then use their goals
and plans to make the final decision.
As for people who continually make bad decisions, explains Beach, one of the reasons
may be that they hold values that are self-defeating.
Old theories revived
Just as values may sway a person's decision, emotions may too, according to some of
the more traditional decision-making researchers who, contrary to the criticisms of
some NDM researchers, say they have begun addressing more real world decision
tasks. And, in fact, their research is building on and expanding some old theories first
discovered in the lab, they say.
"It's silly to say that our theories and experiments are useless," says Princeton's
Kahneman. With an eye toward possible legal reform, for example, he, David
Schkade, PhD, of the University of Texas, Austin School of Business, and legal
scholar Cass Sunstein, of the University of Chicago Law School, have been
collaborating on studies of how individuals and mock juries set punitive awards.
Under controlled conditions they replicated the familiar observation that dollar awards
are erratic and relatively unpredictable, but that ratings of outrage over the same cases
are highly consistent across individuals and juries. Dollar awards are erratic, they
find, because jurors must map their outrage onto an unbounded and unfamiliar scale.
But if people are able to compare two cases, they have a better chance of awarding
damages commensurate with their level of outrage, Kahneman and his colleagues are
beginning to find. For instance, if people compare the case of a child who was
severely burned because her pajamas weren't fire retardant--a case that evokes outrage
--and the case of a car dealership that was sold shoddy inventory by another
dealership, they will award the child far more in punitive damages than the defrauded
company. That finding holds even if the compensatory damages for the child-$500,000--are far less than for the company--$10 million. In contrast, when people
hear the cases without an opportunity to compare them, the car dealership will receive
more in punitive damages.
These findings confirm a theory from early lab work called "preference reversal,"
which states that people may make different decisions depending on whether they
decide in isolation or in comparison with another, similar issue.
As the work of Kahneman and others attest, "the early work in the lab has been
enormously useful to solving real problems," says psychologist Baruch Fischhoff,
PhD, of Carnegie Mellon University. "We're finding enough cases when the theories
apply to real world problems that we're glad the work is there. We also learn
something about just how problems discovered in the lab express themselves in the
real world, as well as identify new phenomena that merit the sort of systematic study
only possible in the lab."
It's that kind of back and forth from field to lab, says Beach, that will eventually lead
to strong theories that explain the why and the how of people's decisions.
Klein agrees that some lab work can be helpful--he's even done some himself. But, he
adds, the "naturalistic" simulations must be realistic. To narrow medical decisionmaking down to a set of probabilities and statistics is laughable to any self-respecting
physician, he says.
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