Decision Making and Cognition: Comments

Abstract

In a sense, papers like Gordon Pitz’ bring decision theory back to psychology. Decision theory did not emerge from psychology directly. Instead, psychology came onto the scene in a way which is rather typical for psychology. You do not need psychology as long as everything runs all right. Thus, individual differences in reaction times were not discovered until an astronomer fired his assistant because he reported different times for the passing of a star in the telescope. Similarly, research on visual perception received an important thrust from the discovery of optical illusions; and large parts of developmental psychology were stimulated by the failure of educational programs. Additionally the psychology of thought was partly based on the discovery that human thinking does not always follow the rules of formal logic. Psychology is not the science of pathologic behavior; but somehow we seem to need a science of behavior mainly when we feel that some behavior does not occur as expected. Decision making originally emerged from normative economics. Here too, psychologists became interested in decision making when people did not behave as expected, i. e. as prescribed by the normative laws. As a special field of the psychology of cognition, decision making can be viewed as a kind of problem solving process. When choosing among several alternatives or options available, the decision maker tries to find a correct solution to a problem. Problem solving situations may typically be characterized as having three states.