Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Decision-Making

Decision-making is an important cognitive process in which individuals select a course of action from among multiple possible actions. This entry describes the types of decisions that are made across the life span; outlines the situational, motivational, and neural factors that may affect decision-making; and reviews the types of tasks that are utilized in studying decision-making.

Developmental Overview

Decisions are made at every age, from infancy to adulthood, and the factors that affect decision-making abilities at each stage are critical to understanding human behavior. Children must make decisions daily from choices about safety (e.g., whether or not to cross the street) to decisions about whom they play with at recess. Younger adults decide whether or not to smoke, drink, or use illicit substances and how much time to dedicate to sports, friends, or school. Many of the decisions that younger adults make, such as those concerning future career paths, have the power to affect the course of their lives. Yet, the importance of sound decision-making only seems to increase with age. Older adults have considerably higher average financial resources and are often faced with complex economic decisions (e.g., investments, spending, and when to retire). Older adults must also make critical life choices, similar to younger adults, concerning their health, lifestyles, and time commitments.

Older adults may be able to draw on their rich history of previous decision-making experience and real-world knowledge to make better decisions. Alternately, neural and cognitive declines associated with aging may negatively affect their decision-making abilities. A large body of research is dedicated to determining how aging differentially affects multiple types of decision-making, identifying the tasks and situations in which older adults excel and those that aging negatively impacts.

Decision-making studies often differ based on the age-group in question. In children and adolescents, decision-making is often studied in terms of the ability to make choices similar to those of healthy adults. Decision-making abilities of adolescents and young adults are often assessed in terms of risk-seeking or risk-averse behavior, preferences for immediate and delayed rewards, and susceptibility to peer pressure. Alternately, older adults are often evaluated based on the soundness of their financial and medical decision-making, susceptibility to fraud, and differences in abilities due to neural and cognitive changes.

Factors That Affect Decision-Making

Decision-making can be generalized into decisions from experience and decisions from description. In studies of decision-making from experience, individuals choose repeatedly between two or several alternatives and receive feedback after each choice, informing their future decisions (e.g., the Iowa gambling task and other multiarmed bandit tasks). Modified versions of these tasks are implemented with younger groups, as early as 3–4 years of age. Decisions from experience may also examine the exploration/exploitation trade-off, preferences for immediate or delayed rewards, or preference or avoidance of risk or uncertainty. Data from these types of tasks are often fit with computational models geared toward quantifying strategy implementation, often finding that older adults are more likely than younger adults to utilize simple heuristics in these types of tasks.

Alternately, in decisions from description tasks, individuals are provided with a scenario or information about multiple options to inform a single choice. Much research examining this type of decision-making focuses on important life decisions adults make, particularly regarding health and finances (e.g., medical decision-making, buying houses or stocks, choosing between health insurance plans or wireless plans). These studies often present older adults with a scenario and record their responses, evaluating the choice as well as the information used to make the decisions.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution