Decision Modes

A Big Picture

There are myriad decision modes. But almost all of them can be classified into a small number of categories defined according to several metadecisions that are made, consciously or otherwise, in virtually every decision situation. Here the expression metadecision refers to a decision about how to decide. The decision mode tree in Figure 1 provides a big-picture view of the decision modes that result from these metadecisions. The discussion proceeds from the “Responsibility” node near the top of the tree down to the bottom.

Responsibility

In every decision situation, someone—either an individual person or a collective—must assume responsibility for making the decision in question. Thus, for example, in the contemporary United States, it is understood that the patient herself has the responsibility—or “right,” “privilege,” “authority,” “obligation,” “burden,” even “duty”—for deciding how her breast cancer will be treated. Usually, on a local basis, at least, assumptions about decision-making responsibility are so broadly accepted, so “natural,” that the issue never crosses people's minds. Discussions of responsibility do not occur except under extraordinary circumstances, such as when the assumptions are contested. Only then do people realize that responsibility typically has been established via earlier metadecisions made by others, including society, as suggested by the “Prior metadecisions” node in the decision mode tree. For instance, many Americans are first spurred to think about responsibility for cancer treatment decisions when they learn that Japanese responsibility customs are different from their own. They are surprised to learn that in some long-standing Japanese traditions, a cancer patient might not even be told by her physician and her family that she has the disease. Or take the case of end-of-life decisions. When the patient is incapacitated, as in the Terri Schiavo case in Florida, which ended on Schiavo's death in 2005, who has the right to decide—the patient's spouse, the patient's parents, the state legislature, Congress, or the courts? Many people had never pondered such knotty questions until media coverage of the Schiavo case forced them to do so.

Digression: Adequacy of Mode Metadecisions

Part of the full scientific story of human decision behavior is an understanding of how and why people make the mode metadecisions that they do. But there is a practical side, too. Suppose that, at some metadecision choice point in the mode tree, the decider goes down one path rather than some other. Furthermore, suppose that this increases the odds that the eventual decision will be effective. Then it is legitimate to say that that metadecision is better than it would have been otherwise. The following discussion briefly addresses adequacy concerns as well as questions about how particular metadecisions are reached.

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