Decision-making

The process of choosing between alternatives – generating, evaluating, and selecting amongst a set of relevant choices.

Rather easier decisions concern a relative certainty about both the facts and the values involved in them. For example, regular television viewers will have a pretty good idea of what content they wish to watch at eight o’clock on a Sunday evening: what’s being broadcast at that time, the nature of the shows ‘on offer’, and what the viewer likes. Decision-makers know what they will get from the decision, and they know what they’ll be likely to get if they take any of the other principal courses-of-action, e.g., how enjoyable for them the alternatives are on the other stations – leaving aside such things as VCR/DVD/USB, etc., recording, internet “on demand” viewing if available, or being able to display or monitor more than one station’s broadcasts at once, etc.

Decision-making becomes more difficult when there is uncertainty, either about what will happen or about what one wishes to happen. A decision situation can be made deceptively easy if the decision-maker fails to consider significant complicating factors: ignoring the uncertainty, disregarding any confusion over the relative importance of one’s values in the situation, etc. It can also be made more difficult, for example, by failing to recognize important simplifying facts about the world pertinent to the decision-maker and their situation or a certain unclarity by the decision-maker about what really matters to them, etc.

When faced with decisions in life decision-makers must often grapple with uncertainty.