Judgment and Decision Making: A Personal View

The large number of textbooks recently published identifies the field of judgment and decision making as one of the areas of psychology in which research activity grew most rapidly during the past two decades. The enthusiasm is easily explained: The topic has much to make it appealing to investigators. Its focus is a large puzzle that will not go away—a search for the bounds of human rationahty. It includes a deep normative theory that offers criteria for rational action. It is also rich in amusing anecdotes and challenging brain teasers. The study of judgment and choice occasionally sheds light on events in the real world, including the decisions of world leaders, the foibles of the market and the pitfalls of medical diagnosis. The doubts that psychologists have raised about the rationality of human agents are having a modest effect on neighboring disciplines, such as economics and political science, in which the assumption of human rationality is often used to predict the outcomes of competitive interaction. The detailed study of bounded rationality also has implications for the human engineering of information systems, decision aids and organizational procedures. The following observations sketch a personal view of this exciting field, its history, accomphshments and limitations, and possible future.