Decision making can be considered as an acivtity of solving a problem through a solution which is the best. The process may or may not be rational and can be grounded on knowledge and thinking.
For instance, someone may have a secured job, decent savings and an enjoyable life but when the same person wants to quit the job, use all the savings and take an additional loan to start a business then the decision taken will impact the future of the person and those connected to that person. The impact can be either positive or negative. If the business takes off then the person will never regret having taken the decision but if the business fails the person is going to regret. The decision made by the person to begin or not to begin the business may have taken several days because of the various facts that might have been taken into consideration.
The main part of decision making comprises of analysing certain number of alternatives defined in terms of evaluative conditions. The next step involves to rank these alternatives on how good they can be to the decision maker once all the conditions are measured at the same time. Another part in the process of decision making could be to identify the best alternative or to find out the priority of each alternative especially in financial cases, when all the alternatives are taken in consideration consurrently. Solving such problems is the main objective of multiple criteria decision analysis or MCDA.
Researchers and experts who have studies this section of decision making continue to debate its exactness because the results are different despite the fact that the data is same. This is because the MCDA methods are different.
When the experts use their knowledge in a specific area to make informed decisions then it is knows as logical decision making and it is an part of science based professions. Take for example, decision making in the medical field requires diagnosis and the selecting the right method of treatment for the disease or condition. However, in naturalistic decision making the situation is different and usually in form or more emergency. In such conditions the decision is taken on intuition – instant decisions rather than planned methods. Decisions like this are taken without evaluating alternatives.
Several studies and experieemnets reveal that even environmental intricacies tend to influence intellectual functions.
If the measure of environmental intricacy is high then the thought process works in a better way and the decision taken is also a good one.
Would you like to read more about this topic? This book might interest you: Decision-making.