Broadening behavioral decision research: Multiple levels of cognitive processing

Abstract

The area of behavioral decision research-specifically, the work on heuristics and biases-has had a tremendous influence on basic research, applied research, and application over the last 25 years. Its unique juxtaposition against economics has provided important benefits, but at the cost of leaving it disconnected from too much of psychology. This paper explores an expanded definition of behavioral decision research through the consideration of multiple levels of cognitive processing. Rather than being limited to how decision makers depart from optimality, we offer a broader analysis of how decision makers define the decision problem and link decisions to goals, as well as a more detailed focus on processes associated with implementing decisions.Over the past few decades, the area of cognitive psychology has grown dramatically, social and developmental psychology have moved strongly in a cognitive direction, and behavioral decision research (BDR) has emerged as a new area of psychology. BDR is unique among psychological subfields in the impact that it has had on research outside of psychology, including its impact on economics, finance, public policy, law,medicine, marketing, organizational behavior, and negotiation. Unfortunately, BDR has also moved farther away from many core areas of psychology, limiting its theoretical development and its integration with advances made in allied areas.Our central thesis is that the most well known part of BDR-the heuristics and biases approach-has been overly constrained by a focus on how people make mistakes at the point of decision. Research on heuristics and biases has implicitly assumed that the goal is known and that the details of implementing decisions are not part of the problem. The prescriptive goal is optimality defined in terms ofthe behavior of rational agents, and, from that perspective, the heuristic and biases literature has yielded a fascinating catalog of human decision errors that is important for both theoretical and practical reasons. A drawback with this orientation, however, is that it tends to define human decision making by what it is not. As a consequence, it does not provide an effective framework for the detailed study ofdecision makers' (often multiple) goals that serve to define a decision context or the linkages between goals and processing issues associated with implementing decisions. We seek to add these components to decision-making analyses, without losing the key strengths of the heuristics and biases approach. This paper overviews the historical development of BDR, highlights a number of challenges to BDR, examines the potential ofconsidering multiple levels ofanalysis to organize new directions for BDR, illustrates the potential for a more psycho-central perspective to decision making within this framework, and provides examples of recent and ongoing research across levels. Collectively, our aim is to build on the strengths of BDR by broadening the framework used to understand how we make decisions. In pursuing this strategy, we are bui...

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