Decision-Making: From Lab to Real-Life

Abstract

In the paper, I focus on criticising mainstream contemporary approaches to decision-making research. I argue that such approaches are severely limited and in certain aspects provide a false account of decision-making since: (a) their conception of decision-making is partly wrong since they do not emphasise enough the subjective aspects of decision-making, and do not truly conceive decision-making as a goal-oriented activity; (b) they focus on researching specific, inconsequential and unimportant decision situations and problems that do not have much in common with decisions of everyday life; and (c) they research decision-making almost entirely from the third-person perspective, leaving out the first-person perspective. Consequently, the subjective character, being essential, even intrinsic to decision-making, and how decision situations are understood/interpreted by decision-makers, are poorly understood at best. Contemporary approaches to decision-making research thus lead to a severely limited and to some degree perverted image of decision-making, potentially reducing the researched phenomenon to something that it is in fact not.