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In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e. unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
Neville A. Stanton is a British Professor of Human Factors and Ergonomics at the University of Southampton. Prof Stanton is a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng), Chartered Psychologist (C.Psychol) and Chartered Ergonomist (C.ErgHF). He has written and edited over forty books and over three hundred peer-reviewed journal papers on applications of the subject. Stanton is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of The Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors and a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He has been published in academic journals including Nature. He has also helped organisations design new human-machine interfaces, such as the Adaptive Cruise Control system for Jaguar Cars.
Task analysis is a fundamental tool of human factors engineering. It entails analyzing how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task.
Escalation of commitment is a human behavior pattern in which an individual or group facing increasingly negative outcomes from a decision, action, or investment nevertheless continue the behavior instead of altering course. The actor maintains behaviors that are irrational, but align with previous decisions and actions.
Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA), that is, understanding an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to a time vector or other factors, is critical for appropriate and optimized decision making in many environments. It is formally defined as:
“the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future”.
Cognitive ergonomics is a scientific discipline that studies, evaluates, and designs tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems and how they interact with humans and their cognitive abilities. It is defined by the International Ergonomics Association as "concerned with mental processes, such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system. Cognitive ergonomics is responsible for how work is done in the mind, meaning, the quality of work is dependent on the persons understanding of situations. Situations could include the goals, means, and constraints of work. The relevant topics include mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance, human-computer interaction, human reliability, work stress and training as these may relate to human-system design." Cognitive ergonomics studies cognition in work and operational settings, in order to optimize human well-being and system performance. It is a subset of the larger field of human factors and ergonomics.
Gary Klein is a research psychologist famous for pioneering in the field of naturalistic decision making. By studying experts such as firefighters in their natural environment, he discovered that laboratory models of decision making could not describe it under uncertainty. His recognition-primed decision (RPD) model has influenced changes in the ways the Marines and Army train their officers to make decisions.
Recognition-primed decision (RPD) is a model of how people make quick, effective decisions when faced with complex situations. In this model, the decision maker is assumed to generate a possible course of action, compare it to the constraints imposed by the situation, and select the first course of action that is not rejected. RPD has been described in diverse groups including trauma nurses, fireground commanders, chess players, and stock market traders. It functions well in conditions of time pressure, and in which information is partial and goals poorly defined. The limitations of RPD include the need for extensive experience among decision-makers and the problem of the failure of recognition and modeling in unusual or misidentified circumstances. It appears, as discussed by Gary A. Klein in Sources of Power, to be a valid model for how human decision-makers make decisions.
Klein Associates Inc. is the company founded by Gary A. Klein to apply his research on decision-making in naturalistic settings. On September 2, 2005, Klein Associates was acquired by Applied Research Associates, a New Mexico-based firm that develops engineering solutions for private and public sector clients. Klein remains associated with the firm as Chief Scientist.
Group decision-making is a situation faced when individuals collectively make a choice from the alternatives before them. The decision is then no longer attributable to any single individual who is a member of the group. This is because all the individuals and social group processes such as social influence contribute to the outcome. The decisions made by groups are often different from those made by individuals. In workplace settings, collaborative decision-making is one of the most successful models to generate buy-in from other stakeholders, build consensus, and encourage creativity. According to the idea of synergy, decisions made collectively also tend to be more effective than decisions made by a single individual. In this vein, certain collaborative arrangements have the potential to generate better net performance outcomes than individuals acting on their own. Under normal everyday conditions, collaborative or group decision-making would often be preferred and would generate more benefits than individual decision-making when there is the time for proper deliberation, discussion, and dialogue. This can be achieved through the use of committee, teams, groups, partnerships, or other collaborative social processes.
Macrocognition indicates a descriptive level of cognition performed in natural instead of artificial (laboratory) environments. This term is reported to have been coined by Pietro Cacciabue and Erik Hollnagel in 1995. However, it is also reported that the term was used in the 1980s in European Cognitive Systems Engineering research. Possibly the earliest reference is the following, although it does not use the exact term "macrocognition":
A macro-theory is a theory which is concerned with the obvious regularities of human experience, rather than with some theoretically defined unit. To refer to another psychological school, it would correspond to a theory at the level of Gestalten. It resembles Newell’s suggestion for a solution that would analyse more complex tasks, although the idea of a macro-theory does not entail an analysis of the mechanistic materialistic kind which is predominant in cognitive psychology. Thus we should have a macro-theory of remembering rather than of memory, to say nothing of short-term memory, proactive inhibition release, or memory scanning. To take another example, we should have a macro-theory of attending, rather than a mini-theory of attention, or micro-theories of limited channel capacities or logarithmic dependencies in disjunctive reaction times. This would ease the dependence on the information processing analogy, but not necessarily lead to an abandonment of the information processing terminology, the Flowchart, or the concept of control structures. The meta-technical sciences can contribute to a psychology of cognition as well as to cognitive psychology. What should be abandoned is rather the tendency to think in elementaristic terms and to increase the plethora of mini-and micro-theories. ... To conclude, if the psychological study of cognition shall have a future that is not a continued description of human information processing, its theories must be at what we have called the macro-level. This means that they must correspond to the natural units of experience and consider these in relation to the regularities of human experience, rather than as manifestations of hypothetical information processing mechanisms in the brain. A psychology should start at the level of natural units in human experience and try to work upwards towards the level of functions and human action, rather than downwards towards the level of elementary information processes and the structure of the IPS.
Dynamic decision-making (DDM) is interdependent decision-making that takes place in an environment that changes over time either due to the previous actions of the decision maker or due to events that are outside of the control of the decision maker. In this sense, dynamic decisions, unlike simple and conventional one-time decisions, are typically more complex and occur in real-time and involve observing the extent to which people are able to use their experience to control a particular complex system, including the types of experience that lead to better decisions over time.
Following Maurice de Montmollin, the French distinguished generally two major trends in ergonomics:
A judge–advisor system (JAS) is a type of advice structure often studied in advice taking research, a subset of decision-making in the social sciences. The two roles in a JAS are the judge and advisor roles. The judge is the decision maker who evaluates information concerning a particular decision and makes the final judgment on the decision outcome. The advisor is an individual who provides advice, information, or suggestions to the judge. A key component of the dynamics in a JAS is the differentiation between the two roles in that while the advisor provides input to the decision, actual decision-making power resides solely with the judge. This one person decision power differentiates the JAS and related models such as Hollenbeck's Hierarchical Decision-Making Team model from more widely studied models where the final decision is mutually decided upon by the team as a whole.
Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases – unconscious, automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce reasoning errors.
Human factors and ergonomics is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Primary goals of human factors engineering are to reduce human error, increase productivity and system availability, and enhance safety, health and comfort with a specific focus on the interaction between the human and equipment.
Mica Endsley is an engineer and a former Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force. The position of the Chief Scientist was created over 60 years ago to provide independent scientific advice to the Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, as well as to its senior leadership. In this role, she worked with the top scientists and engineers within the Air Force as well as in academia, industry, and the other armed services to ensure that the Air Force's research and development efforts remain relevant and effective. Additionally, as the Chief Scientist she responded to any tasking from the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff on issues or opportunities of a scientific and technical nature that may arise. Endsley was the first human factors engineer and the first female to serve as Chief Scientist.
Automation bias is the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct. Automation bias stems from the social psychology literature that found a bias in human-human interaction that showed that people assign more positive evaluations to decisions made by humans than to a neutral object. The same type of positivity bias has been found for human-automation interaction, where the automated decisions are rated more positively than neutral. This has become a growing problem for decision making as intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits have increasingly integrated computerized system monitors and decision aids to mostly factor out possible human error. Errors of automation bias tend to occur when decision-making is dependent on computers or other automated aids and the human is in an observatory role but able to make decisions. Examples of automation bias range from urgent matters like flying a plane on automatic pilot to such mundane matters as the use of spell-checking programs.
Cognitive systems engineering (CSE) is a field of study that examines the intersection of people, work, and technology, with a focus on safety-critical systems. The central tenet of cognitive systems engineering is that it views a collection of people and technology as a single unit that is capable of cognitive work, which is called a joint cognitive system.
References
- ↑ Klein et al. 1993.
- ↑ Newell, Benjamin, R.; Lagnado, David, A.; Shanks, David, R. (2007). Straight choices: The psychology of decision making. New York: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-84169-588-4.
Bibliography
- Johnson, Joseph G.; Raab, Markus (2003). "Take The First: Option-generation and resulting choices" (PDF). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 91 (2): 215–229. doi:10.1016/S0749-5978(03)00027-X.
- Klein, Gary A.; Orasanu, Judith M.; Calderwood, Roberta; Zsambok, Caroline (1993). Decision Making in Action: Models and Methods (PDF). Ablex. ISBN 978-0-89391-943-6. Archived from the original on 2012-01-28.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - Klein, Gary A. (2008). "Naturalistic Decision Making" (PDF). Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. 50 (3): 456–460. doi:10.1518/001872008X288385. PMID 18689053. S2CID 11251289.
- Todd, Peter M.; Gigerenzer, Gerd (2001). "Putting naturalistic decision making into the adaptive toolbox" (PDF). Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 14 (5): 381–383. doi:10.1002/bdm.396.
- Zsambok, Caroline E.; Klein, Gary A. (1997). Naturalistic Decision Making. L. Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0-8058-1874-1.