Cognitive Approaches to Decision Making

Abstract

Decision making is such a fundamental part of human activity that a satisfactory explanation of how people choose between various courses of action would seem to be a central problem for psychology. Though there has been much research addressing this problem, until recently it has remained comparatively in-dependent of other areas of psychology with little evidence for the exchange of ideas that has occurred between these other areas. In trying to explain this sep-arate development, one may point to the fact that the intellectual tradition informing research in decision making was rather different from the traditions informing other areas of psychology. Until recently, decision theory has provided the dominant perspective and because this has its origins in economics and statistics, it differs from other areas of psychology that are founded on such intellectual traditions as associationism.