Decision Making: Introduction

docs from all over Europe followed the call of the German Volkswagen foundation to convene in Berlin and discuss their common research interests. The Volkswagen initiative, called the “European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities” (www.volkswagenstiftung.de/ funding/off-the-beaten-track/european-platform-for-lifesciences-mind-sciences-and-the-humanities.html) aims to promote the networking and interaction of young academics doing research at the interface between the cognitive neurosciences, humanities, and social sciences. The initiative is genuinely multidisciplinary, and the participants’ backgrounds range from psychology and philosophy through psychiatry, engineering, mathematics, and neuroscience to economics and social science. At the inaugural meeting, participants split up into smaller groups, one of which was based on a shared scientific interest in decision-making. About half of the contributors to this special issue participated in that group. Even though we had opportunities for several days to discuss our views of what decision-making is, requires, and involves, we failed to come to a consensus, and we disagreed even on the very definition of our research topic. Despite our dissent, we quickly realized that the divergence in our ideas and methodological approaches was anything but a disadvantage, and that there is potentially much to gain from an intensified interaction. But we also appreciated that a first necessary step was to collect the different views and perspectives on decision making and locate them within a common context. Thus, the idea for this special issue was born. As the title suggests, the core purpose of this issue is to gather interdisciplinary perspectives on decision making. We strongly emphasize the interdisciplinarity and, even though this issue obviously contains articles from both g g p p y emer in and well-established disci lines, we articularl encouraged less conventional synergies—for example, between philosophy and psychiatry, or systems engineering and psychology. A further aim is to bridge the gap d between junior academics and internationally recognize senior scientists (although we acknowledge that some of the senior people are actually also still quite junior in “absolute” terms). We therefore aspired to an equal balance between contributions from as yet less established and those from well-known authors. Finally, we hope to r promote an improved interaction between yet (more o less) isolated disciplines, and to stimulate more cooperative future research among the various disciplines. As a starting point, we asked every contributor to pror vide us with his/her own view of decision making. Thei answers illustrate the divergent perspectives of the different fields on the science of decision making, and the protagonists’ expectations thereof. Representatives of the economists’ fraction, for example, emphasized the stochastic nature of choice as a natural link between economic models and cognitive and neuroscience theories of decision. They also stressed the “as if ” flavor of ecot nomic decision models (“as if ” models are theories tha predict choice without any claim that it spells out how exactly choice comes about). This was mirrored by the behavioral ecologists’ definition, according to which a decision occurs whenever an animal produces one action m in the face of alternatives, regardless of the mechanis through which this happens. However, the economists also stressed that the intensified collaboration between psychology and neuroscience confirmed that individud als indeed make decisions as predicted by economic an ethological theory. In additon, the same collaboration has f also changed the prescriptive approach in the direction o a more process-based approach by showing that elements of some “as if ” decision models appear to be encoded in p the human and nonhuman rimate brain.