What Is Decision Making?

A goalkeeper decides whether to come for a cross. A manager decides whether to challenge a recommendation that everyone else seems to support. A parent decides whether to intervene or wait. A leader decides whether the problem in front of them is urgent, important, or simply loud.

All of these are decisions. They are not the same kind of decision. That distinction matters because the phrase decision making is used so broadly that it can hide more than it explains. Some choices are fast and largely automatic. Others are slow, deliberate and reversible. Some are made with good information. Others are made with fragments, pressure and no opportunity to wait.

The interesting question is therefore not simply why people make good or bad decisions. It is what changes the way a person sees the decision in the first place.

We do not decide in one way

The neat version of decision making is familiar: gather information, compare options, estimate consequences and choose the best available course. Sometimes people do exactly that. Often they do not. Work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky helped establish how strongly judgement can be affected by framing, anchoring, loss aversion and other predictable tendencies. We do not approach every choice as neutral analysts. Memory, expectation, habit, emotion and context arrive with us.

That does not make human judgement useless. It means it is adapted to conditions where speed often matters. A footballer cannot stop play to calculate every passing option. An emergency clinician cannot build a model before acting. Experienced people frequently recognise patterns before they can fully explain what they have recognised. Gary Klein's research on firefighters, military personnel and other professionals working under time pressure showed that experts often do not generate a long list of alternatives. They recognise a situation, mentally test a plausible response and act if it appears workable.

This kind of intuition can be extremely valuable. It can also be wrong. Kahneman and Klein later examined this apparent contradiction together. Their conclusion was more useful than either "trust your gut" or "never trust your gut". Intuition becomes more credible when the environment contains patterns that can genuinely be learned and when the person has had enough relevant practice and feedback to learn them.

A goalkeeper who has faced thousands of crosses has learned something real from repetition. A manager who has spent years being rewarded for confidence has not necessarily learned to forecast a market. Experience helps when the environment teaches the right lesson.

More information is not always better information

Poor decisions are often blamed on missing information. Sometimes that is exactly the problem. But another problem is just as common: plenty of information, badly weighted. A person can have twenty metrics on a screen and still miss the two that matter. A coaching staff can collect enormous amounts of physical and technical data and still misunderstand why a player has become hesitant. A management team can produce more reports without reducing the uncertainty at the centre of the decision.

Gerd Gigerenzer's work has challenged the assumption that more complex analysis must always produce better judgement. In uncertain environments, relatively simple rules can sometimes perform surprisingly well because they focus attention on strong cues rather than treating every available signal as equally useful. The point is not to ignore data. It is to distinguish information from noise. That is harder than it sounds.

Decision fatigue has become an easy explanation for poor judgement: make enough choices, become mentally depleted, then start making worse ones. The evidence is more complicated. A widely cited 2011 study of Israeli parole decisions reported that favourable rulings appeared more common after breaks and less common later in decision sessions. The finding became a powerful example of tired decision-makers defaulting to the safer option.

Later critiques raised important questions about the interpretation, including the ordering of cases and other possible confounds. So the study should not be treated as proof that decision quality simply falls in a straight line as choices accumulate. The broader point is more defensible: cognitive state changes. Sleep, sustained attention, stress, workload and fatigue can affect how information is processed and how much effort people are willing or able to invest in a decision.

A decision made early in a calm day may not be approached in exactly the same way after hours of interruptions, meetings and conflict. The difficulty is that people are not always good at recognising how much their own state has changed.

Emotion is already inside the judgement

Emotion is often described as something that interferes with rational thinking. That separation is too clean. Research by Jennifer Lerner and colleagues has shown that different emotions can influence judgement in different ways. Fear, anger and sadness do not simply make a person "more emotional". They can affect risk perception, certainty, attention and what feels acceptable. The practical problem is not that emotion exists. It is that it is often easier to see in other people than in ourselves.

An athlete may recognise a teammate's frustration while insisting that their own rushed decisions have nothing to do with frustration. A leader may describe a room as defensive while missing the fact that their own tone changed when they felt challenged. A strong feeling can carry useful information. Fear may draw attention to a genuine threat. Unease may signal that something does not fit previous experience.

But intensity is not the same as accuracy. A useful question is therefore not only, What am I feeling? It is also, What is this feeling making easier or harder for me to notice?

A beginner sees a great deal because almost everything is unfamiliar. An expert filters. They know which details usually matter, which can be ignored and which patterns deserve attention. That filtering is one reason expertise produces speed. It can also create blind spots. Research on the Einstellung effect in chess has shown that a familiar solution can draw attention so strongly that a better alternative becomes harder to discover. Eye-tracking studies found that experienced players continued to spend more attention on features associated with the familiar solution even while trying to find another one.

The implication is important. Expertise does not only change what people know. It changes what they notice. Most of the time, that is exactly why expertise is valuable. The risk appears when the current situation resembles an old pattern closely enough to trigger recognition, but differs in the detail that matters most. The question is not whether expertise should be trusted. It is whether this situation deserves the pattern being applied to it.

Some decisions go wrong before the choice

Framing is one reason people can go wrong before they begin comparing options. Tversky and Kahneman famously showed that equivalent outcomes can lead to different preferences depending on whether they are presented as gains or losses. Outside experiments, framing is rarely so obvious. "Should we continue investing in this project?" is not the same question as "If we had not already spent money on this project, would we start it today?"

"Can this player cope at this level?" is not the same as "What conditions would allow this player to show the level they already have?" "Why is this person resisting?" is not the same as "What might they be protecting?" The facts may not have changed. The question has. And once the question changes, different information becomes visible.

Some poor outcomes do not begin with a bad decision at all. They begin with the absence of one. A programme continues because nobody formally stops it. A role remains badly designed because redesigning it would create conflict. A strategy survives because challenging it would also mean challenging the person who originally proposed it. Nothing dramatic happens. That is precisely the problem.

Decision quality is therefore not only about choosing well from a set of options. Sometimes it begins with recognising that a decision is required.

Deciding how to decide

The strongest decision-makers I have worked with are not always the fastest. They are not always the most analytical either. What they tend to do well is match the process to the problem. Some decisions need speed because delay is costly. Some need dissent because agreement has come too easily. Some require more data. Some require experience. Some require distance from the person who designed the original plan.

A reversible, low-cost choice does not deserve weeks of analysis. A high-stakes decision that is difficult to reverse should not be rushed because a meeting is ending. Three questions are often useful before the main one: How reversible is this decision? How much uncertainty are we really dealing with? What state am I in while making it? The last question is easy to dismiss because it sounds less objective than forecasts, numbers and evidence.

It is still part of the decision. If someone is exhausted, angry, embarrassed, under time pressure or invested in proving a previous decision correct, those conditions matter whether they are acknowledged or not. Good decision making is often described as choosing the right option. By then, much of the important work has already happened. We have noticed some things and missed others. We have framed the problem in a particular way. Experience has made some patterns easier to recognise. Emotion has changed what feels risky. Pressure has changed what feels tolerable.

The final choice is the visible part. That is why intelligence alone does not protect against poor judgement. Neither does experience. Neither does data. All three can help. Their value depends on the conditions in which they are being used. The useful question is therefore not only: What should I decide? It is: What is shaping the way I am seeing this decision right now? That question does not guarantee a better answer. It improves the conditions in which the answer is reached.

ALTIUS Note

This article belongs to the ALTIUS editorial library: evidence-based essays on Human Performance, Leadership and Society.

Research References

Kahneman, D. — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533557

Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. — "Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree" — American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755

Klein, G. — Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1998)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262611466

Gigerenzer, G. — Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (2007)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780143113768/gutfeelings

Lerner, J. S., Li, Y., Valdesolo, P., & Kassam, K. S. — "Emotion and Decision Making" — Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 799–823 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115043

Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. — "Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones: The Mechanism of the Pernicious Einstellung (Set) Effect" — Cognition, 108(3), 652–661 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.05.005

Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. — "Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions" — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889–6892 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. — "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice" — Science, 211(4481), 453–458 (1981)
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7455683

Related from ALTIUS

• Why Skilled People Sometimes Fail When the Stakes Rise — How pressure changes skilled performance and access to automatic abilities.
• The Performance After the Mistake — What happens after an error and why the next action matters.
• What Is Leadership? — A foundational ALTIUS essay on leadership, judgement and responsibility.

Further reading

• Decision Fatigue Is More Complicated Than a Depleted Brain

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