Decision making is the cognitive process leading to the selection of a course of action among variations. Every decision making process produces a final choice.
It can be an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not know what.
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Therefore, decision making is a reasoning process which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.
Common examples include shopping, deciding what to eat, when to sleep, and deciding whom or what to vote for in an election or referendum.
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Decision making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can never “see” a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made.
Therefore, we conclude that a psychological event that we call “decision making” has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is, based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to affect the action.
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Structured rational decision making is an important part of all science- based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to making informed decisions.
For example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and selecting an appropriate treatment.
Some research using naturalistic methods shows, however, that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to fit a set of indicators into the expert’s experience and immediately arrive at a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives. Also, recent robust decision efforts have formally integrated uncertainty into the decision making process.