Taking stock of naturalistic decision making

TLDR

NDM still faces significant challenges, including improving the quantity and rigor of empirical research and confirming the validity of its prescriptive models. We review the progress of naturalistic decision making (NDM) in the decade since the first conference on the subject in 1989. After outlining a brief history, we identify NDM’s essential characteristics and examine five main contributions: recognition‑primed decisions, coping with uncertainty, team decision making, decision errors, and methodology. NDM identified previously neglected areas such as expertise in sizing up situations and generating options, introduced new models, conceptualizations, and methods, recruited applied investigators, and offered a new perspective on how decisions are made. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract

Abstract We review the progress of naturalistic decision making (NDM) in the decade since the first conference on the subject in 1989. After setting out a brief history of NDM we identify its essential characteristics and consider five of its main contributions: recognition‐primed decisions, coping with uncertainty, team decision making, decision errors, and methodology. NDM helped identify important areas of inquiry previously neglected (e.g. the use of expertise in sizing up situations and generating options), it introduced new models, conceptualizations, and methods, and recruited applied investigators into the field. Above all, NDM contributed a new perspective on how decisions (broadly defined as committing oneself to a certain course of action) are made. NDM still faces significant challenges, including improvement of the quantity and rigor of its empirical research, and confirming the validity of its prescriptive models. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.