Decision Making and Abductive Reasoning

Decision making is widely studied from many different disciplines including economics, psychology, medicine, and public policy. Decisions range in complexity from simple decisions that can be made rapidly with little deliberation to complex decisions that require slower controlled processing. Dual-system models of decision making maintain that there are separable systems or processes that lead to fast or slow decision making. Multi-attribute decisions are often complex, as they involve numerous aspects to the alternatives and we engage in a complex reasoning process when we must make multi-attribute decisions. Decision making is guided by heuristics, which are employed automatically and with little effort. Such heuristics include representativeness, availability, and anchoring. Abductive reasoning focuses on reasoning to the best possible explanation. Decision neuroscience seeks to understand how decision making operates in the brain. Major findings indicate that neurons in the striatum of the basal ganglia are sensitive to rewards. These neurons are responsive to stimuli that predict rewarding outcomes and they also signal failures of reward delivery. The continued study of the brain and decision making, along with cognitive modeling of decision behavior may lead to further advances in understanding how we decide and how we can improve the decisions that people make.