Focus Article: Taking Stock of Naturalistic Decision Making

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. The study of decision making is studded by three-letter acronyms designating sub-disciplines which evolved partly as extensions of preceding sub-disciplines, and partly as a reaction to them: the once-popular CDM emergence of each sub-discipline can be conveniently traced to the publication of books or papers signifying the time at which theory and research pursued more or less in isolation gathered suf®cient mass and coherence to attract wider attention.