Naturalistic Decision Making

 

Naturalistic decision making (NDM) refers to making decisions in naturalistic situations (As opposed to making decisions that are naturalistic!). In other words, given a familiar task and setting, how does a person make decisions and commit to certain courses of action over others? Lipshitz et al. (2001) argue that NDM bears five characteristics:

1. Proficient decision-makers: study experts in the field, as opposed to novices in a lab.

2. A set of decision rules that matches situation to action: experts tend to carry out a matching process in which the knowledge of a given situation is paired with various courses of action, and ultimately the most compatible course of action is selected. This is in contrast to more analytic accounts of decision making, in which logical inferences might be made to arrive at a conclusion.

3. An informal process of modeling context-specific situations, as opposed to a formal, analytic one.

4. A frame of mind geared towards process

5. A means of deriving prescriptions from observed facts

 

Measuring NDM is one of the messier areas of research, because it is characteristically observed in the field. In contrast to situation awareness and workload, which are discrete constructs with specialized measurements suited for them, NDM has no particular measurement suited to it. NDM is typically evaluated through observation, ethnography, interviews, and some more analytic methods such as argumentation analysis (Gore et al., 2015, p. 226).

 

 

 

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Gore, J., Flin, R., Stanton, N., & Wong, W. (Eds.). (2015). Applications of Naturalistics Decision Making. British Psychological Society

 

Lipshitz, R., Klein, G., Orasanu, J., & Salas, E. (2001). Taking stock of naturalistic decision making. Journal of behavioral decision making, 14(5), 331-352.