Although everyone has goals, only some people successfully attain their respective goals on a regular basis. With this in mind, the author attempts to answer the question of why some people are more successful than others. He begins with the assumption that the key to personal success is effective decision-making, and then utilizes his own theory--The Self-Regulation Model--to explain the origin and nature of individual differences in decision-making competence. The author also summarizes a number of existing models of decision-making and risk-taking. This book has two primary goals: * to provide a comprehensive review of the developmental literature on the decision-making skills of children, adolescents, and adults, and * to propose a theoretical model of decision-making skill that offers a better description of this skill than prior accounts. Taken together, the literature review and theoretical model help the reader acquire a clear sense of the development of decision-making skills as well as reasons for the developmental differences that seem to emerge.
Goal-Directed Decision Making: Computations and Neural Circuits examines the role of goal-directed choice. It begins with an examination of the computations performed by associated circuits, but then moves on to in-depth examinations on how goal-directed learning interacts with other forms of choice and response selection. This is the only book that embraces the multidisciplinary nature of this area of decision-making, integrating our knowledge of goal-directed decision-making from basic, computational, clinical, and ethology research into a single resource that is invaluable for neuroscientists, psychologists and computer scientists alike. The book presents discussions on the broader field of decision-making and how it has expanded to incorporate ideas related to flexible behaviors, such as cognitive control, economic choice, and Bayesian inference, as well as the influences that motivation, context and cues have on behavior and decision-making. Details the neural circuits functionally involved in goal-directed decision-making and the computations these circuits perform Discusses changes in goal-directed decision-making spurred by development and disorders, and within real-world applications, including social contexts and addiction Synthesizes neuroscience, psychology and computer science research to offer a unique perspective on the central and emerging issues in goal-directed decision-making
In recent years, newspaper articles, television specials, and other media events have focused on the numerous hard decisions faced by today's youth, often pointing to teen pregnancy, drug use, and delinquency as evidence of faulty judgment. Over the past 10 years, many groups - including parents, educators, policymakers, and researchers - have become concerned about the decision-making abilities of children and adolescents, asking why they make risky choices, how they can be taught to be better decision makers, and what types of age-related changes occur in decision making. This book serves as a starting point for those interested in considering new ways of thinking about the development of these issues. The purpose is to bring together the voices of several authors who are conducting cutting-edge research and developing new theoretical perspectives related to the development of judgment and decision making. The Development of Judgment and Decision Making in Children and Adolescents is divided into three parts: Part I presents three distinctive developmental models that offer different explanations of "what develops" and the relative importance of different cognitive components and experiential components that may be important for developing judgment and decision making skills. Part II emphasizes the emotional, cultural, and social aspects of decision making--three topics that have been influential in the adult literature on judgment and decision making but are just beginning to be explored in the developmental area. Part III provides three examples of research that applies developmental and decision making models to practical research questions. This book is intended for the professional market or for graduate courses on decision making or cognitive or social development.
Behavioral strategy continues to attract increasing research interest within the broader field of strategic management. Research in behavioral strategy has clear scope for development in tandem with such traditional streams of strategy research that involve economics, markets, resources, and technology. The key roles of psychology, organizational behavior, and behavioral decision making in the theory and practice of strategy have yet to be comprehensively grasped. Given that strategic thinking and strategic decision making are importantly concerned with human cognition, human decisions, and human behavior, it makes eminent sense to bring some balance in the strategy field by complementing the extant emphasis on the “objective’ economics-based view with substantive attention to the “subjective” individual-oriented perspective. This calls for more focused inquiries into the role and nature of the individual strategy actors, and their cognitions and behaviors, in the strategy research enterprise. For the purposes of this book series, behavioral strategy would be broadly construed as covering all aspects of the role of the strategy maker in the entire strategy field. The scholarship relating to behavioral strategy is widely believed to be dispersed in diverse literatures. These existing contributions that relate to behavioral strategy within the overall field of strategy has been known and perhaps valued by most scholars all along, but were not adequately appreciated or brought together as a coherent sub-field or as a distinct perspective of strategy. This book series on Research in Behavioral Strategy will cover the essential progress made thus far in this admittedly fragmented literature and elaborate upon fruitful streams of scholarship. More importantly, the book series will focus on providing a robust and comprehensive forum for the growing scholarship in behavioral strategy. In particular, the volumes in the series will cover new views of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and models (dealing with all behavioral aspects), significant practical problems of strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, and emerging areas of inquiry. The series will also include comprehensive empirical studies of selected segments of business, economic, industrial, government, and non-profit activities with potential for wider application of behavioral strategy. Through the ongoing release of focused topical titles, this book series will seek to disseminate theoretical insights and practical management information that will enable interested professionals to gain a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the subject of behavioral strategy. Decision Making in Behavioral Strategy contains contributions by leading scholars in the field of behavioral strategy research. The 10 chapters in this volume cover a number of significant issues relating to the decision making processes, practices, and perspectives in the field of behavioral strategy, covering diverse topics such as failures in acquisitions, entrepreneurs under ambiguity, metacognition, neural correlates of emotion, knowledge flows, behavioral responses, business modeling, and alliance capability. The chapters include empirical as well as conceptual treatments of the selected topics, and collectively present a wide-ranging review of the noteworthy research perspectives on decision making in behavioral strategy.
In this book on nature and social thought, the author seeks to understand decision-making and its legitimation in our social world against the background of an evolving sensibility about nature. Given the finite scope of our natural resources, and our infinite capacity as decision-makers to use nature, we are compelled to formulate some of the issues that underlie our transactions with nature. This will be useful for students and scholars in philosophy and psychology departments, decision and management sciences, business and law schools, environmentalists and policymakers. Contents: Consequences of Uncertainty; Moral Perspective; Inquiry and the Origins of Human Rights; Equity Decisions; Economic Development and Environmental Prudence; Changing Landscapes; Decisions, Values and Progress.
"Our scientific understanding of human Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) has grown considerably over the past 60 years in terms of the normative benchmarks (or standards) by which we assess performance, the descriptive models we use to describe JDM, and the prescriptive solutions we offer to improve JDM. Indeed, policy and practice in several domains such as education, management, and medicine have benefited from the findings of JDM research. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the theoretical literature and empirical research has discussed human JDM with little reference to its changing or dynamic nature. This is partly due to the historic coincidence that the field of JDM developed in competition with static economic models, such as expected utility theory, and to limiting methodological commitments such as investigating JDM in single-trial, cross-sectional studies with the primary focus on cognitively fully functioning adults"--
This book focuses on the very nature and function of intuitive thought. It presents an up-to-date scientific model on how the non-conscious and intuitive thought processes work in human beings. The model is based on mainstream theorizing on intuition, as well as qualitative meta-analysis of the empirical data available in the research literature. It combines recent work in the fields of philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and positive psychology. While systematic research in intuition is relatively new, there is an abundance of positions advocating more or less imaginative ideas of what intuition is about, ranging from quantum mechanical phenomena to new age ideologies. Research in the past few decades, in particular by proponents of the dual processing theory of thought such as Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Evans, offers powerful tools to address and evaluate the question of intuition without the need to resort to spiritual entities. Within the framework of the dual processing theory, backed up by findings in positive psychology, intuition turns out to be the capacity to carry out complex cognitive operations within a specific domain of operations familiar to the agent.
An argument that representational decision making is more cognitively efficient, allowing an organism to adjust more easily to changes in the environment. Many organisms (including humans) make decisions by relying on mental representations. Not simply a reaction triggered by perception, representational decision making employs high-level, non-perceptual mental states with content to manage interactions with the environment. A person making a decision based on mental representations, for example, takes a step back from her perceptions at the time to assess the nature of the world she lives in. But why would organisms rely on representational decision making, and what evolutionary benefits does this reliance provide to the decision maker? In Efficient Cognition, Armin Schulz argues that representational decision making can be more cognitively efficient than non-representational decision making. Specifically, he shows that a key driver in the evolution of representational decision making is that mental representations can enable an organism to save cognitive resources and adjust more efficiently to changed environments. After laying out the foundations of his argument—clarifying the central questions, the characterization of representational decision making, and the relevance of an evidential form of evolutionary psychology—Schulz presents his account of the evolution of representational decision making and critically considers some of the existing accounts of the subject. He then applies his account to three open questions concerning the nature of representational decision making: the extendedness of decision making, and when we should expect cognition to extend into the environment; the specialization of decision making and the use of simple heuristics; and the psychological sources of altruistic behaviors.
