Taking stock of naturalistic decision making

Abstract

We review the progress of naturalistic decision making (NDM) in the decade since the ®rst conference on the subject in 1989. After setting out a brief history of NDM we identify its essential characteristics and consider ®ve of its main contributions: recognition-primed decisions, coping with uncertainty, team decision making, decision errors, and methodology. NDM helped identify important areas of inquiry previously neglected (e.g. the use of expertise in sizing up situations and generating options), it introduced new models, conceptualizations, and methods, and recruited applied investigators into the ®eld. Above all, NDM contributed a new perspective on how decisions (broadly de®ned as committing oneself to a certain course of action) are made. NDM still faces signi®cant challenges, including improvement of the quantity and rigor of its empirical research, and con®rming the validity of its prescriptive models.

Embodied uncertainty: living with complexity and natural hazards

“…In the decision-making literature many studies focus on rational choice models (Becker 1978;Tversky and Kahneman 1986), which consider decision-making to be a series of analytical stages: identify the problem, generate and evaluate a set of options, implement the preferred option (Flin 1996;Saaty 2008). However, many decisions are made based on intuition, in a faster, almost automatic way often termed naturalistic decision-making (Lipshitz et al 2001). Naturalistic settings are characterised by ill-structured problems, uncertain environments, shifting ill-defined goals, action/feedback loops, time-stress, high stakes and multiple players (Zsambok and Klein 2014).…”

Positive transfer and negative transfer/antilearning of problem-solving skills.

“…CDCTs have been a popular task environment for examining many phenomena, including motivational and affective processes in complex decision making (Earley, Connolly, & Ekegren, 1989;Locke & Latham, 2002;Vancouver, 1997), skill learning in naturalistic decision making (Brehmer, 1992;Kerstholt, 1996;Lipshitz, Klein, Orasanu, & Salas, 2001), memory and attentional processes in problem solving (Burns & Vollmeyer, 2002;Miller et al, 1999;Vollmeyer et al, 1996), and implicit learning (Berry, 1991;Berry & Broadbent, 1988;Dienes & Fahey, 1995, 1998. Their popularity and range make them ideal for studying the acquisition and transfer of skill-based knowledge in a variety of complex interactive environments (Campbell, 1988;Cañas, Quesada, Antoli, & Fajardo, 2003;Funke, 2001).…”

Número 9 completo

“…(Cyert y March, 1963;Janis, 1972;Langley et al, 1995;Laroche, 1995;Mintzberg et al, 1976). El reciente desarrollo de la corriente de «toma de decisión naturalista» (Lipshitz et al, 2001) da testimonio de la pertinencia de tales enfoques. En el abundante contexto de esta corriente de investigación, el estudio de las situaciones de diseño mientras se desarrollan (decision-as-practice), ofrece un campo privilegiado de estudio de la decisión, concebida como el resultado de la cooperación de diversos actores implicados en una actividad de trabajo, aunque estén a una distancia de miles de kilómetros.…”