THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 1
“He Who Hesitates Is Lost, But Only for the Moment”
An Action-Hesitancy Model of Decision Making
Zeljka Buturovic1
1
Phone: 917-514-4891
Email: zeljka@paradox.columbia.edu
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Abstract
Here I propose an approach to understanding decision making, an approach I dub the actionhesitancy model. People strive to make obvious decisions and act without hesitation. When
obviousness is lacking, they hesitate. They seek new information and insight, to reappraise their
situation and to come to a course of action of action that seems obvious. Much of current
decision-making theory sees the essence of decision making in weighing costs against benefits,
with a high degree of precision. In contrast, the action-hesitancy model emphasizes human
resourcefulness in sifting and gathering knowledge, separating relevant from irrelevant, and
engaging in self-correction.
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Decision-making is primarily a psychological, not an economic phenomenon. For one,
humans make decisions about many things, and decisions on how they will spend their money
are just a fraction of them. Though these other, apparently non-economic decisions, such as a
choice or a career or a spouse, often do have economic consequences that make them interesting
to economists, they are rarely seen as economic decisions from the point of view of the person
making them or other observers.
In addition, the primary interest of psychologists has traditionally been behavior an
experience of an individual (Wegner & Gilbert, 2000), perhaps a small group, and, only
exceptionally, behavior of groups of tens of millions of individuals that are often of interest to
economists. Yet, a model of human decision-making developed for aggregate purposes, such as
those of economics, can be misleading when it comes to understanding individual behavior. For
example, a conception of atoms as solid balls is very useful for the aggregate purpose of
statistical mechanics but completely misguided when it comes to the study of atoms themselves.
Similarly, a crude, mathematical approximation of a decision-maker that is very convenient for
aggregation might turn out to be profoundly mistaken about the very nature of decision processes
at the individual level.
For economists, the choice under uncertainty is modeled by the expected utility theory
(Mas-Collel et al, 1995). Briefly, expected utility theory describes a person making a decision as
having a preference relation over a set of lotteries, where each lottery is a set of probabilities
over possible outcomes. These lotteries are different in a sense that each of them “favors” some
outcomes at the expense of others. If the preference relation over this set of lotteries satisfies
certain assumptions, then these preferences can be represented by a utility function of the
expected utility form. This means that each of the outcomes (for various alternative courses of
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action) can be assigned a number (utility) such that numerical ordering of the expected utility of
each alternative (lottery) perfectly mimics the person’s preferences over lotteries. Thus, the most
preferred alternative (lottery) is the one with the highest expected utility. Conceptually, utilities
and probabilities are supposed to be derived from the observed behavior – that is, one’s
preferences are assumed to be revealed through his actual choices. However, it has been a
common practice, especially in psychology, to treat those utilities and probabilities as
introspectively available, and argue that a rational agent should follow a course of action with the
highest expected utility.
Almost everything that has been done in psychological research on decision-making has
its roots in this theory. The classic anthology “Choices, Values and Frames” (Kahneman &
Tversky, 2000), for example, has 42 papers that are largely critical of the view that expected
utility theory adequately describes human decision-makers. Yet, none of these papers discusses
choices or values conceived in any other sense but that of choices with clear financial
implications. In addition, all papers are couched within basic conceptual framework of expected
utility theory and its conceptual heirs, such as Prospect Theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 2000)
and novel versions of regret theory (Humphrey, 2004). The lay person interested to learn basics
of human decision-making psychology is likely to be quite surprised by what sort of problems
decision-making experts actually study.
This research is often perceived as data-driven, but that impression is - at best - justified
in comparison with the sort of research that the same theory instigated within mainstream
economics. But when this research is compared to what has been done in mainstream
psychology, we see that it is, to the contrary, very much theory-driven. The massive empirical
evidence that has accumulated as a result of this research program was to a large extent directed
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at falsifying a very specific theory, namely, the expected utility theory, and not at collecting
robust data on actual decision-making, on which a psychologically plausible theory will then be
built. More significantly, the theory in question was embraced by economists, not by
psychologists, and, representation theorem which made its conceptual foundations was
discovered by a mathematician (Ramsey, 1926).
At the time when the decision-theory within psychology was developed, many
psychologists were behaviorists. Whatever weaknesses of his research program, Skinner cannot
be accused of assuming that humans are perfectly rational agents (Schultz, 2006) – quite the
opposite. And while expected utility theory is still defended by economists though by saying that
Kahneman at al. misunderstand it (Gul & Pesendorfer, 2005), it is quite difficult to find a single
psychologist who ever seriously defended it and there are probably not many who really know
what it is or whether its exposition by other psychologists is adequate. Thus, criticisms of
expected utility theory were, to a large extent, conducted within scientific community that was
ill-prepared to assess any successes that that theory had in addressing problems relevant to
economists and consequently offer it proper defense.
This is not to say that concerns about the conceptual underpinnings of decision-making
models in psychology are new – just that previous ones don’t go far enough. The appropriateness
of couching the study of decision-making within the consequentialist framework of the expected
utility theory has been questioned for a number of years (Loewenstein et al, 2001). Starting with
the early arguments about limitations of working memory and attention and pervasive use of
heuristics and more recent arguments about the role of feelings and automatic processes in
decision making (e.g. Wilson et al, 1993; Wilson & Schooler, 1991; Damasio, 1994), empirical
adequacy of consequentialist frameworks has been thoroughly challenged, and, as a result, semi
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non-consequentialist models have started to emerge. For example, Loewenstein et al. have
proposed a risk-as-feelings hypothesis – a non-consequentialist model in which behavior partly
results from goal-oriented considerations but partly from feelings unmediated by cognitive
considerations. Kahneman (2003) proposes a two-system view of human cognition, in which
fast, parallel, automatic processes are supplemented by slow, serial, effortful processes. This
general framework then gets supplemented by a clearly consequentialist model of prospect
theory to yield explanation for some of the decision-making phenomena. Higgins’s regulatory
focus theory (1997) is an attempt to step back from consequentialist thinking by assuming that,
apart from goals themselves, the way of approaching goals (promotion vs. prevention) and its fit
with the kinds of goals pursued needs to be taken into consideration for a number of phenomena
to be explained.
What is common to these attempts is that they have retained the basic consequentialist
framework imported from economics and then tried to attach to it a non-consequentialist
supplement. This did not and cannot come without a cost. For example, the cost of adding a
direct route from feelings to outcome of a decision in the risk-and-feelings hypothesis
(henceforth RAF) is abandonment of the notion of a decision altogether. That notion is now
replaced by ‘behavior’2. In some sense, this had to happen. When, in what began as a decisionmaking model, the route opens for situations in which no consideration of options is available, it
seems that the fragile notion of a decision has to be discarded since its essence is consideration
of options. However, since the consequentialist kind of thinking and resulting models emerged
precisely because of the way situations normally described as ‘decisions’ are conceived, once the
concept of decision is removed from the model, the appeal of all other major decision-making
The replacement is intentional and significant. In the words of authors: “…the term decision… is deliberately
replaced with behavior… [which] reflects the observation that many types of emotion-driven risk-related
behaviors…. Do not seem to reflect decisions in the sense that the term is usually used.
2
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concepts (outcomes, probabilities) for explaining human behavior is no longer obvious. Put
simply, once the model starts explaining all behavior rather than just what is meant to be
decision-making it is no longer clear that personal probabilities (as opposed to say, expectancies,
scripts, motives, skills etc) should be an interesting concept to work with. In addition, the novelty
of questioning sufficiency of consequentialism which gives RAF competitive advantage
compared to other models of decision-making (had RAF remained a decision-making model)
loses its importance. For, while consequentialism is pervasive among decision-making models, it
is not necessarily pervasive among models of human behavior in general. For example,
connectionist models of human behavior such as CAPS (Mischel, 2004) go beyond
consequentialist frameworks.
The case of the two system (henceforth TS) model (Kahneman, 2003) illustrates on its
own problems of integrating non-consequentialist considerations into a consequentialist model.
Prospect Theory is a clearly consequentialist model – in terms of conceptual understanding of
decision-making it is not very different from the expected utility theory. Because this prevents it
from adequately addressing non-consequentialist aspects of decision-making, it gets
supplemented by another model – a model about two processes, the TS model. That model,
however, is not a model of decision-making. It is a model of human mind, regardless of whether
it is making decisions or not. Both models are then used as explanations for decision-making
phenomena but their mutual relationship is not worked out theoretically and it is quite unclear
how it could be.
This problem is not accidental or limited to the TS model. It reflects the underlying
difficulty that that all these attempts have which comes from the fact that, despite original
additions, they have retained the basic consequentialist framework. The idea that making a
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decision is, at the core, evaluation of outcomes of alternative courses of action appears to be so
central to the very notion of a decision and so powerful in explaining broad patterns of human
behavior that it is understandably difficult for any model to part from it. But its very power is, I
believe, what makes supplementing it so difficult. Consequentialist models essentially do not
need theoretical supplements. They are largely silent about the psychological processes involved
in decision-making because they do not need them to explain broad patterns of human behavior –
in fact, they were never meant to describe those processes. The point was, rather, to separate
pattern of choices (that satisfies the assumptions of the expected utility model) into two
independent factors: subjective probabilities and perceived utilities. Fitting additional cognitive
processes into this basic model makes the model look either unnecessarily complex or as a model
of something other than decision-making.
Yet, looking from a broader psychological perspective, consequentialism must be at least
partly inadequate as a model of decision-making. One area in which that was never really in
doubt is the area of moral judgment and decision-making. Moral decisions are clearly decisions
in a sense that they involve considerations of options, but, as a rule, they involve more tension
between utility of the outcome and permissiveness of the action itself. Still, any account of
decision-making should be able to explain how they occur. Expected utility model is quite
capable of explaining them, as notions of utility and preference are able of addressing all kinds
of decision-making situations, including those that are perceived as dealing with morals. This is
reflected in the fact that one of the most prominent traditions in moral philosophy is
utilitarianism, a less rigorous exposition of the same idea. However, perhaps because of its prima
facie psychological implausibility, the study of moral psychology did not start with utilitarianism
at its foundation (rather, it began with another species of rationalism – deontology).
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Bypassing utilitarianism turned out to be a good choice for moral psychology. There
exists an ample demonstration of the existence of taboo-tradeoffs (Turiel, 1983; Tetlock, 2003),
that is, decisions where people refuse to engage in cost benefit analysis (for example, how much
would they ask to sell their right to vote). In minds of people cost-benefit analyses which might
be interpreted as eminently rational from an economic perspective, are deemed immoral and
impermissible. Furthermore, studies have shown that moral behavior is greatly influenced by
contextual information. The study of “trolley problems” - a family of moral dilemmas in which
the agents are forced to inflict harm in order to obtain a greater good (for example, direct a train
towards killing one innocent person in order to save five innocent people tied to train-tracks) showed that subtle changes in context with no clear cost-benefit implications (such as pushing a
person to the tracks as opposed to merely flipping a switch) have great consequences to
judgment of permissibility of actions (Greene, 2007).
Finally, a number of studies have shown that justifications of judgments, which often
have a form of cost-benefit analyses, often follow rather than precede judgments themselves – a
fact demonstrated both in moral judgments (e.g. Haidt, 2001) as well as decision-making proper
(Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). As a result, attempts have been made (most significantly by Haidt,
2001) to provide models of moral judgment that would soften the overly rationalistic,
deontological view of moral decision-making. Haidt’s (2001) model, in particular, postulates that
moral judgments mainly result from moral intuitions and, to some extent, posthoc reasoning,
both of which can influence and be influenced by intuition and reasoning in a surrounding social
environment. However, this particular model makes no attempt to relate itself to judgments of
non-moral issues, perhaps because consequentialism is perceived to be indispensable in
modeling the latter. Thus, inadequacy of consequentialism in explaining moral choices and
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judgments has cemented a separation of theoretical accounts of decision-making that is explicitly
related to morals from the “mainstream” decision-making.
Empirical discoveries within both traditional decision-making research and research in
moral psychology have increasingly put pressure on the conceptual foundations of the expected
utility theory, with many attempts to graft these discoveries on this theory. In addition,
psychological research unrelated to decision-making has, over many years, uncovered robust
facts about human mind and behavior. Among these facts are the following:
Subjective construal
The idea that human mind interprets the environment is perhaps the least controversial
thesis in all of psychology (Griffin & Ross, 1991). From the infinite multitude of physical
stimuli, human mind extracts a tiny fraction and organizes it into a meaningful whole. This idea
is fundamental to the Gestalt approach to psychology (Koffka, 1935). In a famous study, Asch’s
(1946) showed how a set of terms changes meaning when additional term (such as warm vs.
cold) is added to it. It is further supported by the long list of effects produced by mere labeling
on behaviors such as opinions in politics (Gilovich, 1981), and amount of money offered in an
ultimatum game (Camerer, 2003). The subjective construal by definition depends on the
cognitive-affective state of the agent, which might or might not be phenomenologically
accessible. This has been demonstrated by priming effects (e.g. Nisbett and Ross, 1980; see
Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Srull & Wyer, 1986 for reviews).
From this follows that, whenever an agent tries to make a decision, he see himself as
being in a certain kind of situation. One’s history, mood (Bodenhausen, Gabriel, & Lineberger,
2000), knowledge or perceived social role are thus all likely to be factors in his decisions. There
is no a priori reason to assume that this construal always involves subjective probabilities and
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utilities as psychological upgrades of the economic model imply. In principle it might be argued
that all types of subjective construal can be reinterpreted in terms of personal probabilities and
utilities – but if that is so, then an empirical argument must be made that psychological findings
well outside of decision-making literature might be reasonably re-interpreted within it (Goldstein
& Weber, 1997). It cannot be merely assumed that a forced choice in a gamble with explicitly
stated probabilities can be extended to all other, or, for that matter, any other, situation. Another
possibility is to restrict the study of decision-making to whatever situations are obviously
construed in terms of probabilities and utilities of different outcomes or alternatively, impose
such appraisal of the decision-situation on the subject whose decision-making is being studied.
This in fact has largely been the case, but it is not clear whether there is any reason, apart from
historical development of the field, why should psychologists limit themselves in this way.
Inconsistency between attitudes and behaviors
To talk about what is right is one thing, to notice that such a talk bears on a situation at
hand a whole other. This has been pointed out at least since Mill (1869) and Dewey (1924). “The
power of the situation” is a set of empirical observations that speaks to the fundamental role of
environment in determining the actual course of actions taken. Every theory of decision-making
has to address the question of why making a decision about a behavior in a hypothetical or
verbally described situation, such as asking subjects what they would do or what ought to be
done in an experimental set-up that tests for conformity (e.g. Asch, 1955) and making the actual
decision as reflected in the course of action actually taken, can be so very different. The focus of
decision-theories on judgment as opposed to actual behavior possibly reflects a general
conviction within cognitive psychology that psychology should study competencies (such as
judgments of grammaticality) as opposed to performances (that is, actual spoken or sign
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language). In fact, early on Chomsky (1975) explicitly claimed that study of performances, that
is, actual behavior, is intractable. While this assumption allows one to separate signal and noise,
it also has the inconvenient implication that behavior of actual subjects in the Milgram’s
experiment is irrelevant for the science of psychology. What matters is their competency to judge
such behavior as inadequate when presented with the case in abstraction. It is not at all obvious
that such focus in study of decision-making is justified (Agnew, Carlston, Graziano & Kelly,
2009).
Decision-making is eclectic
Decision-making is not a single cognitive process. In fact, almost all mental processes
can be utilized in some decision-making situations. But this fact has been unintentionally
obscured in research driven by a very specific theory, focused on a single way of making
decisions. As we have seen above, the expected utility framework assumes that decision process
begins with a choice within a fixed set of options which is, from that point, effectively sealed
from any new information regarding either options or their likelihoods of occurring. In
experimental situation these options are most often provided by the experimenter. However, in a
natural environment, figuring out what the options are is one of the most important parts of
decision-making. In addition, the whole universe of options can be radically transformed by
introduction of outside information. If one is trying to choose a fabric for his sofa, for example,
and is offered various options with available prices etc, his understanding of his decision
problem will transform radically if he is to learn over the cell-phone that his house is on fire.
Decision-making theory must leave the agent the option to radically change his mind and
discover new options at any point in the decision-making process. Following economic tradition,
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theories of decision making have instead focused on a state of the agent faced with fixed options
with no access to either outside information or even his own memory.
The action-hesitancy model
This paper proposes a new, non-consequentialist decision-making theory that can satisfy
these major properties of decision-making as well as some others. The first requirement in
approaching decisions in a psychologically fresh way is to address the issue of why decisions
happen at all – that is, why there exists hesitancy.
The state of hesitancy is a failure of decision-making processes that normally produce
action. We need to make a decision when the course of action - because of an inner conflict,
“objective” uncertainty, cognitive ambiguity, conflicting information or some other reason – is
not obvious to us. Decision-making, then, should not be construed as aiming at any particular
goal (such as hedonic maximization) but as process that returns us to the state where the course
of action is obvious. The intuitive appeal of hedonic maximization stems from the fact that
actions with clearly hedonically superior outcomes often are obvious. Consequently, evaluation
of possible outcomes is just one of many strategies used to resolve hesitancy, not a foundation or
a model for all others.
If this distinction between obviousness and hesitancy seems a little nebulous that is
because it inherited its nebulousness from a distinction between cases in which decisions are
made and cases in which no decision-making is involved that is embedded in most of the current
models of decision-making (see Loewenestein et al, 2001 for the exception already discussed).
Thus, obvious decisions are usually not considered to be decisions at all, so what are usually
thought of decisions are cases of hesitancy. But rather than pinning the distinction on a property
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such as intentionality, as some models do (Kahneman, 2003) the model I am proposing pins its
distinction to a less metaphysically burdened notion of mere hesitancy.
However, the change goes beyond merely renaming the old distinction. The reason why
previous “no-decisions” are now made an integral part of decision-making model is because they
serve as a model for all decisions. In other words, each agent is trying, when hesitant, to bring
himself into the state of action, that is, the state in which decisions become obvious again (Figure
1). The appreciation of the connection between certainty of attitudes and behavioral action has a
long history and a strong empirical record (e.g. Abelson, 1988; Barden & Petty, 2008). In
addition, it has been shown (Buturovic-Bradaric, 2010) that experimentally manipulated feeling
of obviousness influences one’s willingness to act on it, which corroborates the importance of
certainty in decision-making.
The way the agent leaves the hesitancy stage is by acquiring new beliefs which in turn
change his perception of his situation in a way that makes some course of action obvious. Thus,
in order to understand what happens when the agent is hesitant we have in parallel to address the
case when he is not hesitant, that is, when decisions he makes are obvious to him. In order to
understand what kind of beliefs the agent is trying to acquire we need to have on mind the ideal
decision that this process aspires to, which is an obvious decision, as shown in Figure 1. In other
words, though considerations of happiness and utility play an important role in decision-making,
when making a decision the agent is not trying to be “happy” - what he is trying to accomplish,
using, deliberately and/or unconsciously, a great number of psychological processes, is to be
certain. Analyses of goals and desires, costs and benefits, probabilities and utilities are, on this
account, just one important tool that agents use in trying to make the choice obvious to
themselves.
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Obviousness relations
Obviousness relations relate composites, which are psychological “summaries” of
environmental situations (appraisals, gists), with courses of action. They have an if-then form
and they are categorical and conditional. A condition needs to be met for any particular
obviousness relation to be activated. But once the condition is met, the course of action is
determined categorically. As far as I can tell, the nature of this categorical activation is best
described as obviousness.
The relation of obviousness between situations and actions can be a result of a variety of
psychological processes. What is common to all of them is that, when in such situation, the agent
acts without seriously considering alternative courses of action. Thus, it is important to
appreciate that the relation of obviousness is not at all the same as one in which, say, “hot”
system of CAPS network is involved (e.g., Mischel, 2004, Ayduk et al, 2002). It is true that
when the agent is in some states, such as when he is very angry, some courses of action (e.g.
slamming the door) might become obvious to him. But the relation of obviousness also exists in
cases that are considered as purely cognitive as any, such as a relation between a mathematical
problem and its solution. There are usually no intense feelings involved in recognizing that, if
one is not sure what x is such that x+3567 = 3578, then, obviously, one should subtract 3567
from 3578, and, obviously, x=11. This process is highly deliberate but, at the same time, it is not
decision-making, because it does not involve serious consideration of different options.
Nor is the relation of obviousness at all the same as “intuition” or “gut feelings”. Intuiting
about a problem or a decision rarely leads to an obvious conclusion (e.g. “my intuition tells me
that I should study law but…”), and some obvious solutions are not at all intuitive. That the
Earth rotates, to take one example, is entirely obvious yet completely unintuitive. In fact, it is
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often precisely results that are – after some substantive learning through hesitancy cycles - both
obvious and non-intuitive, that command our greatest admiration.
This is a very important point, as there exists a great number of “dual-process”
psychological theories that make distinction between intuitive and thoughtful, affective and
cognitive etc, the centerpiece of their theory of judgment (Sloman, 1996). This is not at all the
case with the action-hesitancy (a-h) model. This model can very well acknowledge that there
exists an important and even principled difference between these processes for the simple reason
that it does not specify the single type of a process that brings about relations of obviousness.
The distinction between action and hesitancy is conceptually orthogonal to the distinctions
between emotions, intuition and reflective cognitive processes. It is basically a distinction
between effective (those that deliver actions) and non-effective processes (those that keep the
agent in the state of hesitancy) in a particular context, regardless of the phenomenological nature
of those processes on the cognitive-affective-intuitive dimension.
Unlike some other models (e.g. Reyna, 2004) the action-hesitancy model does not put
emotions, gut-feelings or intuitions on a pedestal. But it does allow that, in many cases,
emotions, gut-feelings and intuitions play a crucial role in the pursuit of action – specifically,
they play it in those cases in which they leave no room for hesitation. If they do leave room for
hesitation they have, in essence, failed in that particular situation. The same holds for reasoning:
if reasoning does not deliver certainty then it has failed in its task. Logic is, on this view, of such
a significant value because it is so efficient in delivering certainty – but only in some contexts.
However, it is the certainty of action, that is, “whatever works”, that is of paramount importance
– and not any particular process across the board.
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The relations of obviousness also cut across a distinction between processes that are
innate (meaning, have a similar form in a variety of environments) and learned, as well as those
that are universal for almost all humans and those that are specific for one person. Some relations
of obviousness are, indeed universal, and some of those almost certainly have a strong genetic
underpinning (for example, it is obvious to many mothers that when their baby cries they should
try to sooth it). But some of them are obviously learned and seen as obvious by only small
numbers of people. For example, only a very small proportion of individuals in the history of our
species have found it obvious that exp(i*π)=-1. But for those that have, this is as obvious as
anything ever is.
Thus, the relations of obviousness between situations and actions subsume variety of very
distinct relations such as instincts, associations, habits and can initiate behavioral scripts, motor
plans, and algorithms for solving classes of problems. These relations can arise in many ways –
through development of innate capacities, one-trial learning, use-it-or-lose-it principle, classical
and operant conditioning. It is very important to note that actions performed influence relations
of obviousness (it looked obvious to Josh that he should drink milk in a carton, but, having found
it to be sour, it is now obvious that he shouldn’t), cognitive-emotional state of the agent and
environment. The a-h model puts a great weight on human ability to learn from their mistakes –
something that is almost entirely absent from decision-making models in the current tradition
which, due to their origin in a static consequentialist model, tend to lack time dimension.
Composites
A composite is a psychological summary i.e. a subjective interpretation of an
environmental situation. The main function of composites is to extract and interpret relevant
features of a context, which allows agents to classify physically different situations under the
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same composite and apply appropriate relation of obviousness, if there are any. The number of
relevant features might be very small, allowing for quite different contexts to be classified under
the same compositional type.
Crucially, the composites can change. They can change because the environment has
changed, because the agent’s state has changed (he turned on the music and now it seems
obvious that he should call his girlfriend), because the agent has endorsed a new belief or
because the agent is convinced (by analogical reasoning, for example) to see his situation in a
different way. In either of the latter two cases, the situation might seem radically different to the
agent, although the environment hasn’t changed. The notion of belief figuring here should be
treated loosely, as possibly having a motivational component – what it means is that the agent
was exposed to some new information, such as advice, he believed it or in some other
psychological way endorsed or accepted it. This event changed the composite, by adding a new
feature, highlighting hitherto ignored feature of the environment or by changing the set of
relevant features altogether.
Hesitancy
When the agent is faced with a new environmental situation he tries to match the
resulting composite to one of composites for which an obvious course of action exists. That is, he
tries to match it to the “if” in the one of the existing “if-then” obviousness relations. As
explained above, if the obvious course of action is available, the agent pursues it. Hesitancy
happens when there is no obvious course of action available for the current composite, because
the agent is torn among multiple possible interpretations or, alternatively, conceives of situation
too broadly and “does not know what to think”.
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One thing that the agents can do in this situation is to search for a subset of composites
which do have obvious courses of action associated with them and that are, at the same time,
cognitively close to his present composite. The courses of action associated with this subset of
composites are what are normally considered to be ‘options’ – something that the agents
normally need to construct as opposed to be given by the experimenter. Starting with the closest
option, our agent might try to understand what sort of cognitive state he needs to be in – for
example, what additional beliefs he needs to acquire - in order for things to be obvious to him.
He then goes on to search for information that will bring him to this state.
Another possibility is that the agent reinterprets his current situation. One way to do this
would be by reasoning from analogies. Analogies can help discovery entirely new and obvious
options, or help make non-obvious possibilities obvious. If one is considering, for example,
whether to be a vegetarian and is hesitant about that, he can be convinced to become one by the
analogy animals=children. Since he would obviously not eat children, and animals are, by
assumption, identical to children, then he should not be eating animals. So, by reasoning by
analogies, the agent corrects his view of his circumstances. However, this correction is always
tied to a certain environment and state, so it does not follow that agent will equate animals and
children in all circumstances.
There exists a tradition within decision-theory (Keynes, 1921; Selten, 1978; Cross, 1983)
of modeling all decisions “under uncertainty” as cases of analogical reasoning. According to a
recent version of this approach (Gilboa & Schmeidler, 2001), when a person is faced with a
decision problem, it calculates the value of similarity function between that problem and cases
available in memory. For each course of action, the agent then calculates the utility of that course
of action as a linear combination of similarity function between the new problem and memory
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 20
cases and utility of outcomes associated with these memory cases. There is an important
similarity of this approach with my basic framework – namely, the idea that the person tries to
match the current composite to some set of composites available, and that she often does so by
using analogical reasoning.
There are several fundamental differences. For example, in the a-h model, the agent does
not associate utilities with composites. It is obviousness relations that implicitly represent
hedonic consequences of decisions, but only at a crude level – options that would be considered
hedonically different if measured on a continuum can nevertheless be approximated by the same
psychological composite. Also, the nature of composites that the agent uses is such that
composites are not necessarily based on actual experience or statistical learning of categories but
can be hypothetical in nature. The most important difference however is the existence of the
feedback loop, that is, active attempts on the side of the agent to reshape his composite. This
does not exist in Keynes’ model or does that are derived from it. This is a theoretical
consequence of the fact that Keynes and those who followed on his steps did not make a
distinction between successful (obvious) and unsuccessful matching. As a consequence, on the ah account, the matching of the current problem (composite) and available problems does not
have to be based on analogies – whether it is will depend on the information that the agent
acquired and the problem at hand.
The creation of composites depends on the obviousness relations that are available to the
agent. A scientist devoted to a theory will tend to see many different situations as belonging to
the same composite. Once one learns about mass and acceleration, he sees great variety of
different situations as belonging to “accelerating mass” composite. Wildly different physical
situations (rotating Earth and moving truck) can be, in a given context, perceived as being of the
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 21
same type i.e. reducing to the same composite. The composite depends on the situation and the
state of the agent. It is a psychological fact of priming, predated many centuries by the idea of
“laws of association”, that the psychological state of the agent will be influenced by his previous
states – either those that he has been recently in or those that are chronically accessible to him.
The composites that are more often accessed will be the first options to be considered in most
cases, and often new options will be recognized within old composites, resulting in hierarchical
growth of composites.
One of the most prominent forms of belief-acquisition behavior is a consultation with
other agents. But it is not the only one. Other ways of belief-acquisition is memory-retrieval and
computation – figuring out what one thinks about an issue given his commitments to other
statements. For example, one can believe in the axioms of classical geometry but not hold a
belief in any particular theorem that follows from them, say about the sum of angles in a triangle.
When faced in with a new problem, that asks for calculation of the third angle of a triangle with
two of them known, he is incapable of providing an answer that seems obvious. Thus, he
embarks on acquiring new beliefs – most likely by reading a book on geometry, asking a teacher
or deriving a theorem on his own.
Once the theorem is derived, his initial problem gets reduced to a class of problems in
which a simple subtraction is asked for, and the answer becomes obvious. But while computation
is a prominent form of belief-acquisition behavior it should not be assumed that all such
behaviors are either effortful or reflective. Observational learning, for example, also counts as a
form of belief-acquisition behavior. If one is hungry yet hesitant to open a snack during the
class-time and then observes somebody else snacking, this might make it obvious to him that he
is permitted to snack. Thus, like there is no single psychological process (reflection or intuition,
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 22
emotion or habit) that drives action, there is no single psychological process that drives belief
acquisition.
This might all sound trivial, and in a sense the observation that people seek new
information when hesitant is entirely trivial. But, in another sense, it is precisely the trivial nature
that makes it important. The reason why it is trivial is because it is very robust. It is ubiquitous
and widely recognized as such. It is not at all clear that subtle, narrow and unexpected gambling
phenomena serve as a more proper foundation for a decision-making theory than phenomena so
robust to be considered trivial. In any case, the account cannot be judged on the triviality of its
founding observations. It can only be judged regarding how it handles empirical data such as:
The role of authority in decision making
Milgram’s experiments are one of the most famous of all psychology. They deliver a
non-intuitive answer to an important question: what will a person decide when faced with a
request to deliver an extremely painful and dangerous electric shock to a fellow participant who
failed in performing an inane task and who alternatively begs and vehemently protests the
treatment, requesting to be released from the “study”? Famously, about 65% of people are ready
to give 450 V electric shocks because experimenter told them to (Milgram, 1969; Doris, 2002) –
a result that has recently been corroborated (Burger, 2009). More than 90% are ready to perform
tangential collaborating tasks when another participant is giving such shocks. In a variant of
Milgram’s experiment, 77% gave a (this time real) painful shock to a hapless “cute, fluffy”
puppy (Sheridan & King, 1972).
Hume’s folk-psychological assertion that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of
the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (Hume,
1739) is plainly false. Whatever reason is the slave to here, it is not passion. People giving
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 23
shocks were extremely upset while doing so. Thus, any decision-making theory (such as RAF)
that puts faith into feelings to compensate for the difficulties of consequentialist foundation will
face problems trying to account for this pattern.
The problem is not just that feelings work in the direction that is the opposite of observed
behavior; it is previously observed gap between a decision made hypothetically and a decision
carried out in actual circumstances. This is reflected in the fact that those asked to predict the
results of Milgram experiment grossly underestimated the proportion of obedient subjects,
presumably using a simulation of their own assumed behavior as a measuring stick. But
consequentialist models give little reason to assume that utility and probability of various
outcomes associated with either refusal to participate or follow-through should be different
between the case in which a person participates in the experiment and in which he is merely told
about the experimental set-up. The power of the notion of ‘salience’ to account for the stark
contrast in judgments between two contexts is debatable. It is true that in the real experiment the
authority is very salient compared to its hypothetical version – but so is the suffering of the
victim. Finally, the experiment has shown that participating subjects regularly ask the
experimenter what they should do – a behavior not easily accounted for by the RAF.
The heterogeneous mixture of Kahneman’s Prospect Theory and two-system theory also
faces some difficulties with Milgram’s experiments. To account for the behavior of experimental
participants we need to assume that with each increase in voltage the reference point changes in
such a way to make expected value of following the instructions and possibly killing a person
greater than the value of not following the instructions and saving the person. This seems
implausible because, as already mentioned, few of those assessing those values outside of the
experimental situation see this relation. Perhaps the most generous application of Prospect
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 24
Theory would have hypothetical experiment treated as one decision (whether to follow-through
till the end – that is, 450V), where reference point is the begging of the experiment, and actual
experiment treated as a series of decisions for which reference point changes with each decision
(i.e. each voltage increase). However, it still remains unclear that the expected gains and losses
work out to lead the subject to keep giving shocks, not least because prima facie losses seem to
be much bigger than gains, which is reflected through enormous emotional distress.
Additional problems are the marked hesitancy of the subjects reflected in their asking the
experimenter what to do, as well as sensitivity of their behavior to variety of factors in many
versions of the experiment (when subjects are asked to administer shocks physically, when
instructions are delivered to them over the phone, when they are given the instructions by other
“participants” as opposed to authority, etc) – neither of which is easily accounted for by
consequentialist accounts. This is a result of the fact that behavior of the subjects in the
experiment is, in a sense, neither intuitive nor reflective nor emotional. The participants are very
hesitant and repeatedly seek help from the experimenter; their emotions tell them to stop and it is
unlikely that it is higher reflective processes that tell them to continue.
Haidt’s (2001) model also has difficulty with the fact that when people are presented with
the case of experimental scenario outside experimental environment, they, according to this
model, intuitively judge that it is wrong to deliver shocks to the victim. Yet, when asked to
follow through one’s own judgment – or rather, to make it when it is most pertinent, that turns
out to be quite difficult. It is rather implausible that moral intuitions of the subjects in the
experiment change, as Haidt’s model would suggest – it is more likely that they didn’t see it as
the same situation as the one when they are posed “a moral problem” to reflect on. There is
nothing in Haidt’s model that suggests this should happen.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 25
On the other hand, the a-h model can explain these results reasonably well, though with
less specificity than one would perhaps desire. First, it suggests that there should be a difference
between judging the experiment from the inside and the outside. The physical environment is
plainly different and it is quite reasonable that it should be perceived differently. Then, most of
the subjects who decline to proceed in the experiment decline at the moment where the “victim”
for the first time gives an unequivocal information that he wants the experiment to stop (“Ugh!!!
Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here… My heart is starting to bother me now…I refuse
to go on. Let me out” – this happens at 150V). Other subjects who decline to continue resign at
other points where “the victim” brings additional information. Barely anybody declines to
continue at 225, 240, 255 V – where “the victim” merely repeats what he already said (data
according to Doris, 2002). The models (such as RAF) that put emphasis on vividness as opposed
to informational content would have difficulty explaining why repeated screams help so much
less than new information.
Thus, interpreted within the a-h model, our subject starts with giving shocks because he
unequivocally identifies his situation as the one in which instructions are to be followed – the ifthen relation in question might be something as simple lab experiment -> follow instructions.
When “the victim” starts to grunt the situation somewhat changes, because it brings to attention
new features of the environment that are difficult to integrate with those initially perceived as
relevant. This new information induces hesitancy in some subjects, who, as the model predicts,
seek information to make things obvious again. However, they have difficulty changing the
course of action because information given to them by the experimenter reinforces their initial
composite, making it hard for them to reinterpret their environment and discover new options.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 26
The obedience of Milgram’s subjects is ultimately a perceptual problem - it is not a problem of
feelings or miscalculation.
Learning
The simple prediction of the a-h model is that, if a person faces exact same decision
within the same context multiple times, her response time will become shorter. The reason for
that is accessibility of the relevant composite.
Accessibility refers to the relative ease by which a certain mental item can be retrieved.
Studies in social cognition have showed (e.g. Bargh, 1997) that items that are made accessible
can influence decision, judgments, and behaviors. This easiness is directly embedded into the a-h
model. That model starts with the observation that the agent perceives the situation, and that that
perception is mediated by his current state and existing relations of obviousness. If one needs to
make the same decision multiple times in succession, the relevant composite will become easier
to retrieve, and the response time will become shorter.
None of the models discussed predicts that, when a person is exposed to the same
problem multiple times – for example, if he faces the exact same gambling decision fifty times in
a row, the course of action will be more readily recognized. It might be objected that this is a
trivial problem – that agents want to appear consistent or that they are just responding
“mechanically”. The first hypothesis does not explain why would response time be shorter (it
only explains why would a person make the same decision each time), while the latter requires
an explanation, not a dismissal. On the a-h model it is very clear why this happens – once the
current composite has been successfully reduced to the one for which obvious course of action is
available, the time needed to retrieve the relevant composite again will be shorter. But there is no
reason why this should happen at all on any of the other models.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 27
That stems from the fact that those models don’t have answers to why decisions happen.
Nothing in prospect theory suggests that, if one sees the same gamble a hundred times, he will
hesitate less in giving his answer on his hundredth than on his first trial. The other two models
have the same problem. None of them recognizes decisions as at the same time failures decisionmaking processes and opportunities for those processes to be improved. As we have already
seen, risk-as-feelings hypothesis is, by the authors’ admission, incapable of meaningfully
addressing decisions, and Kahneman’s view is that decisions are different from the rest of
behavior because they involve intentionality.
There is a lot of evidence in problem-solving literature that people do in fact improve
their performance in the general direction of automaticity when repeatedly faced with similar
problems. According to a popular view (Anderson, 1982; Anderson, 2000), this process goes
through declarative and knowledge compilation phase before it reaches procedural stage
characterized by the production rules of the ‘if-then’ form. The consistency of this account of
cognitive skill-acquisition with the a-h model is clear: the pronounced role of verbal reasoning in
the early stages can be interpreting as reflecting attempts to position the current composite within
the already existing network of skills; further knowledge compilation refers to refining existing
composites and correcting obviousness relations through feedback until a new production rule,
that is, obviousness relation has been adopted.
Unfamiliar situations
According to the a-h model, crucial for the prompt recognition of an obvious course of
action are agents’ abilities to properly interpret the situation as well as their ability to recognize
similarity between the composite so computed and a class of composites associated with obvious
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 28
actions. Since the composites are a product of interaction of the environment with the current
state of the agent, it follows that in novel situations (as well as unusual states of mind) the agent
will usually be more hesitant. Generally speaking, a new situation is harder to classify under
obvious composites because an environmental part of the interpretative function has uncommon
values on a great number of parameters (that is what makes it a novel situation). Although the
notion of similarity cannot be reduced to physical similarity, a very different environment can
serve as a special case of a novel situation in which we can look at predictions from different
theories.
The a-h model predicts, thus, that when an agent, say, an American, finds himself in a
distant, unfamiliar country, or a novel environment, such as college or a summer camp, he will
become more hesitant. In fact, it predicts that the more psychologically distant the country (for
example, China as opposed to Great Britain) the more hesitant the agent will get. By becoming
more hesitant, to reiterate, I mean that the agent will be more frequently considering alternative
courses of action. For example, while he normally wouldn’t think about leaving his shoes in
front of a church, he might now start to think about that possibility. It is no longer obvious to him
that he shouldn’t do that. Likewise, if our agent is a freshman in college or even a student
transferred to a new school, it might no longer be obvious to him that he should be speaking in a
class when unclear on the point in the lecture. The a-h model thus predicts that when physical
environment changes, the agent will be more hesitant and in turn spend more time in the learning
phase – about the new country or new school.
If this seems like a trivial observation – sure, what is more obvious than the fact that one
should and does acquire new beliefs when in an unfamiliar environment - we should note that
neither risk-as-feelings hypothesis nor prospect theory actually predict that any such thing should
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 29
happen. Nor does Haidt’ model predict failures of moral intuitions in unfamiliar environments.
Recall that TS hinges the distinction between decisions and no-decisions on intentionality
(“judgments are always intentional and explicit even when they are not overtly expressed”). It is
not at all clear that agents should become more intentional or explicit in a novel environment, or
even that they actually do become more intentional. Two-system theory could resort, perhaps, to
a claim that intuitive system fails to deliver answers in a novel environment (similar argument
might be made on a behalf of Haidt’s model) but it is unclear that that is so and it is also unclear
that system 2 (rule governed, controlled) should be able to compensate for this. As already
discussed, seeking new information does not necessarily imply rule governed reasoning. Simple,
‘unreflective’ observation of others’ behavior (whether they leave their shoes in front of a
church, for example) might be enough for a person to acquire new beliefs. Thus, it seems that
there certainly exist situations where neither intuitive nor reflective system can compensate for
lack of answers except by seeking new information outside of itself.
Confirmation bias
There exists abundant evidence (Ditto & Lopez, 1993) that people’s search for
information is biased towards what they already suspect or desire to be true. Let’s call this effect,
conceived most broadly, confirmation bias. In a typical demonstration of this effect, a person
will be given a hypothesis, such as that another person is an introvert (or extrovert), and asked to
determine whether the hypothesis is true. Invariably, subjects presented with the same evidence
will lean towards the hypothesis which was suggested to them. Those to whom it was suggested
that the person is an introvert will be more likely to conclude that the person is indeed an
introvert, based on the evidence presented.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 30
This phenomenon can be easily explained within the a-h model. The kind of belief that
the person is trying to acquire is a function of her current situation and the candidate situation for
which the obvious course of action is available. Thus, if a new situation leans towards some
composite, yet the decision is not yet obvious, a person will look for information that will make
the decision more obvious, that is, confirming evidence that the new information is of the
candidate type rather than objective evidence that might point to its unique status.
None of the other three models can easily account for this phenomenon. Prospect theory
says nothing about what kind of information will a person seek – as all other models its decisionmaking story begins with an assumption that the person has finished the search for information
and at one fixed moment has to make a decision. Not only is such a set-up highly artificial – it
positively precludes any such theory of saying anything about how information search precedes
apart from reframing information search itself within the cost-benefit framework. Haidt’s model
has some potential to account for information search because it does leave the space open for
justificatory procedures that involve exchange of information. However, it can say little about
the content of those procedures and their dependency on the content of existing moral intuitions.
What allows the a-h model to predict confirmation bias is the fact that it has certainty embedded
as a goal of information search.
Status-quo bias
There is a great amount of evidence that agents typically exhibit the status-quo bias. One
of the most prominent examples in this area has been organ donor enrollment. For example, it
was demonstrated (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003) that enrollments in organ-donation programs in
countries with presumed-consent (in which the person needs to opt out of the program) is 86%-
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 31
100% while in the countries with required-request (in which the person needs to opt into the
program) is 4%-28%3.
From the perspective of the a-h model, the main reason for this effect is that the feature of
the current situation (such as enrollment in an organ donor program) that exhibits the status-quo
bias is irrelevant for the psychological perception of the situation in a great variety of contexts.
While person’s enrollment in an organ donor program is, technically speaking, indeed a feature
of every situation he is in, it is irrelevant for the psychological nature of the person’s composite
in most contexts. In other words, in most contexts, as they are actually perceived, people don’t
care whether they are enrolled in an organ donation program or not, that is, they take whatever
their status is for granted. It is other features of the context (combined with their psychological
state) that define the composite. As a result, they see their situations as being about something
entirely different.
This of course does not mean that the feature in question will necessarily remain
irrelevant. If it is brought to the agent’s attention then the agent might perceive a feature as
relevant and reconsider his choice. People are, after all, not enslaved by default-bias. For
example, one might not have thought a single moment about his enrollment in an organ donor
program, but if his spouse gets a kidney disease he might suddenly start thinking (that is,
acquiring new beliefs) regarding the organ donation enrollment. Less dramatically but more
frequently, a background feature might be brought to attention by advertisements. One took his
old car for granted, but now he saw an advertisement for a good deal on a new car. In a proper
state of mind (say, if he just got a raise) he might find himself in a situation of hesitancy about
3
This observation has, as a rule, been followed by public policy recommendations. An agreement with those
recommendations is not implied by my analysis.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 32
purchasing a new car. The decision to buy a new car might not be obvious to him (at that point or
ever) but advertisement brought attention to the previously irrelevant feature of his situation.
By their very nature, obviousness relations entail that the agent is not seriously thinking
about the case as a case of a decision any more. Thus, the background parameter in question (for
example, enrollment into an organ-donor program) has to come to the agent’s attention in the
way of dilemma before he can at best, become hesitant. In other words, he needs to see his
situation as one that is “about organ-donation enrollment” for hesitancy to be even possible to
occur. If that does not happen, as it often doesn’t, then the agent will be doing whatever he has
been doing regarding that aspect of his situation, that is, he will exhibit the status-quo bias.
Status-quo bias is to an extent accounted for within the prospect theory by the notion of a
reference point. Prospect theory starts with an observation that whatever options the person is
considering, they will be compared to her reference point – his current situation as it is perceived
at that moment. But this does not explain why some options are not considered at all – in this
example, donor program enrollment. Status-quo bias is different and much stronger phenomenon
than an endowment effect – the fact that we tend to over-value things that are ours. It is largely
about the fact that we don’t think about many options that we could in principle think about.
Theories that do not take into account a robust human ability to ignore most facets of their own
lives will face difficulties trying to explain phenomena that follow from that ability.
Change-blindness
Studies of memory have shown a phenomenon called “change-blindness” – a general
inability of people to register changes in their environment that are irrelevant to a task at hand. In
one of the most striking demonstrations of this fact (Simons & Chabris, 1999), people are shown
a video-clip of a group of students playing with a ball and asked to record a number of passes by
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 33
one of the teams. At some point in the clip, a clearly visible person in a gorilla suit passes
through this group of players. More than 50% of subjects fail to notice this unexpected event and
deny it happened when questioned. This fact again corroborates the point that people see their
environment through the lenses of a task at hand that is a central part of the a-h model.
Boredom
In a relatively recent dissertation (Johnston, 2003) it was shown that adding boring details
to a story makes readers better grasp the essence of the story. This suggests that one of the
functions of boredom might be to optimize information search by detracting from a pursuit of
irrelevant information. Since on the a-h model the agent spends a lot of effort acquiring new
beliefs, it seems that a signal that could help him sift relevant from irrelevant would be very
useful. Feeling of boredom could be such signal. Being bored by something allows us to focus on
what is relevant (interesting), as opposed to irrelevant (boring). According to the a-h model, it is
not coincidence that people who are perceived as boring tend to offer less personal information
and less edification (objective information) and ask more questions and offer more
acknowledgments (Leary et al, 1987). Questions and acknowledgments are much less powerful
in converting hesitancy and doubt into action and certainty than those of information provision.
Zeigarnik effect
Zeigarnik effect (Zeigarnik 1927; 1967) refers to an empirical finding that interrupted
tasks are more likely to be remembered than those that are completed. The a-h model implies
that the reason for that is that interrupted tasks can leave people in the state of doubt or hesitancy
regarding the outcome of their activity. In essence, this sort of effect would work to “tag”
questions that remained unanswered, making one more likely to seek information that would
help resolve them.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 34
McGuire “inoculation theory”
McGuire (1961) has demonstrated that previous exposure to counter-arguments makes
one more resistant to persuasion by essentially “inoculating” him against contrary beliefs. In a
typical procedure, the person is exposed to views contradicting some beliefs that he takes for
granted (for example, that one should brush teeth every day) and then offered “refutational
preemption” – a set of arguments that allow the agent to combat contradicting ideas. The
evidence shows that such procedure makes the person more resistant to counter-arguments in
comparison to those who have not gone through an inoculation process. The a-h model is
consistent with this effect.
According to the a-h model, the difference between those who were and who were not
exposed to counter-arguments during refutational pre-emption is that the former have those
counter-arguments more accessible in the hesitancy phase that begins after the person is exposed
to contrary views. Thus, both groups of participants are likely to find themselves in the state of
doubt when their views are contradicted and this doubt can be resolved either through reverting
back to the previous view or in changing one’s views. If counter-arguments are not easily
accessible, the process is more likely to end in reversal of previously held views than if they are
easily accessible.
Concluding remarks
The expected utility theory was developed by economists for the purpose of predicting
aggregate behavior. This theory allows for any behavioral preference over choices (assuming it
satisfies certain axioms, such as transitivity) to be reinterpreted as involving probabilities and
utilities of outcomes associated with those choices, with agents trying to maximize their expected
utility. To my knowledge, no psychologist has ever seriously advocated a view that human
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 35
decision-making consists of maximizing one’s utility. In fact, though the area of decision-making
has been largely addressing decision-making through the lenses of this theory, other fields of
psychology, such as moral psychology, developed without ever taking this model seriously,
despite the fact that they also study humans trying to make decisions.
Extensive psychological research has confirmed that human decision making cannot be
adequately described by a simple consequentialist model. As a result, we have seen a
proliferation of models trying to graft non-consequentialist appendages on the basic
consequentialist framework. As a rule, however, these models have disproportionally directed
themselves to explaining ever more subtle psychological phenomena from a conventional
decision-making literature – a literature that, to a significant extent, has developed as a
commentary on the expected utility theory. As a result, these theories have over-estimated
importance of numeric cost-benefit analysis and, despite embracing feelings or intuitions, as a
whole significantly underestimated heterogeneity of mental processes that people use to make
decisions.
The action-hesitancy model is an attempt to break this pattern by bringing under
consideration a broader range of psychological phenomena and providing a fairly comprehensive
model that can account for them. The model is more similar to social psychology models than to
conventional decision-making models precisely because it pays much more attention to the
extent to which decision-making is a social activity.
THE ACTION-HESITANCY MODEL 36
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