Decide Now - Ditch Decision Making

Abstract

The paper was motivated by the following dissatisfactions: 1. The failure of mainstream academic psychology to have anything interesting or useful to say about people in the real world. 2. The separation of psychology into sub-disciplines or paradigms that don't talk to one another. 3. The failure to distinguish between technical and common language usage when dealing with concepts such as decision making and command. 4. Partly as a consequence of the above, the failure to scope issues properly and preserve different levels of description. Many of these failures arise from inadequate use of language. The language we use to describe phenomena matters. Amongst other things, it divides our world into particular chunks. Two such divisions that have been unhelpful are the separation of decision making into Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) and Classical Decision Making (CDM), and the separation of Command into chunks such as Situation Awareness and Decision Making. It is argued that these divisions are unnecessary if we preserve the unity of what we might call the executive process consisting of a knowledge structure, a control process and an energy element. Links with some classical notions in cognitive psychology are established and some implications for command system design are discussed.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA466120

Entities

People

  • John Campion

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • C4I
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Defense
  • Aircrafts
  • Channel Capacity
  • Command And Control
  • Consciousness
  • Executives
  • Fighter Aircraft
  • Information Processing
  • Language
  • Nato
  • Naval Operations
  • Psychology
  • Psychophysiology
  • Rules Of Engagement
  • Situational Awareness
  • Standards
  • Workload

Readers

  • Economics
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.
  • Theoretical Analysis.