The Routines of Decision Making

Your reviewer is perhaps not the best person to review this book, given the frequent frustrations he has experienced with the lack of applicability of much of the psychology literature. Unfortunately, this criticism applies to this edited book as well. The contributors to this book represent a mountain of capability; the outcome, from the perspective of applying the results to design better systems, is a molehill. And at US$99.95 per copy, I think you would have to be a very dedicated person working within the decision-making domain to want to put this book on your shelf. In our ergonomics version of reality, people seldom make one-off decisions, almost never have full information about the range of possible alternatives, do not know the full extent of the consequences of their decisions and, quite often, do not have the time to explore alternatives. In many cases, the decision-maker is driven not by the goal of making the best decision, but by the goal of avoiding a crisis or a disaster and/or avoidance of blame. This is not the world that mainstream psychology studies. To the credit of the editors and of many of the contributors, they recognise this. As Shanteau et al. (one of the better chapters) state at the beginning of their contribution: ‘. . . stimulus environments change over time . . . the participants change over time . . . Many tasks involve not just a single decision, but a series of ongoing decisions each based, in part, on outcomes from previous decisions . . .’ (pp. 252–253). Now, there is a world we ergonomists can recognise. It is the world of safety-critical systems, of transport and refineries, of medicine and battle spaces, of car plants and high street businesses. Unfortunately, apart from some laboratory simulation studies and a paper on the decisions of sports’ referees, that is as close to a practical world as this book gets. And a perusal of the author index shows 25 references to the work of Klein and his co-authors, seven for Simon, but only one for Rasmussen, Wickens and Woods, and none for Chapanis, Endsley, Hollnagel, Perrow, Reason, Vicente; all names (among many others) we would expect to see in a book of this sort. And the two names with the largest attributions, Betsch and Fiedler, are of people with whose work I am not familiar. In fact, the book seems to be from a parallel universe. Given the breadth of scientific enquiry these days, this is not surprising, but one would have expected more overlap for this topic. What the book does achieve is to relate, for the individual decision-maker, the roles of feedback, learning and memory, and it explores new ideas about the decision-making process within the individual. Furthermore, the whole book is predicated on the notion that decisions are not single, snapshot exercises but occur within a time-stream. This integration of concepts is very welcome, as is the willingness to leave game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma to one side and explore other conceptualisations of how these decisions are made. Nevertheless, there is still room for growth in the thinking of this group of highly intelligent people; it would have been nice to read some chapters Ergonomics Vol. 51, No. 4, April 2008, 587–591