Psychology 3130A/B Chapter 9: Decision – Making

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3130A/B
• Professor: John Paul Minda

Document Summary

Decision-making is about reducing uncertainty, minimizing risk and. People do not like uncertainty as well as animals. Uncertainty often introduces a state of anxiety. Most organisms behave in ways that reduce uncertainty and maintain a status quo. The idea of uncertainty reduction, risk avoidance, and the maintenance of the status quo are central to understanding how humans make decisions. Decision-making involves a combination of knowledge about outcomes, costs, benefits and probabilities. There are several theoretical approaches that attempt to explain and understand how people make decisions. The rational (normative model) sets the standard. People weight alternatives and make the appropriate decision. It is normative as it accounts for decision making behaviour over a long period of time, probabilities are taken into account an infinite amount of times: what should be not what is . A rational approach to decision-making sets a normative standard from which we can investigate deviations.