Disadvantages:
- a decision is agreed upon – individually or with others – but it is not
necessarily implemented. A counsellor, if requested, can at most signal and
assess the fulfilment of decisions made; - decisions are not always capable of replacing contrary habits;
- emotions have variable weight in decision making and can overcome the
rational evidence; - confidence in one’s own decisions may be mistaken with decision-making
competence in any situation; - there is no guaranteed success if one follows / copies a certain decision-
making model or the good practice of others; - the irrevocable character of some decisions, except of the tentative ones;
- the unique character or alternatives, values, possible future, hesitation and
unilateral concentration, which can affect the fair judgement of the decision
maker; - the illusion of being in control in irrational, random, or poorly standardized
situations; - the preference for easy decisions that are momentarily beneficial, however
not grounded individually, but in an opinion current or group pressure (e.g.
enrolling in university under the pressure of family members or classmates); - decision making in a life sector by ignoring connections with other sectors
(e.g. accepting the proposal to work in another city for a better salary and
ignoring the possible negative effects on one’s family life); - the limits of normative models were formulated by Ertelt and Schulz (2002)
as follows: the normative models do not explain the decision making process,
ignore the clients’ ability to take over and process information, elude
blocking strategies, conflicts, emotions resulting from information overload,
the impact of coincidence. Nevertheless, we consider that the normative
models circumscribe a theoretical and aspiration frame of reference for the
counselling process in general; - Ertelt and Schulz (2002) critically and globally analyse the category of
descriptive-heuristic theories, stressing the following aspects: it is assumed
that people use methods to simplify the real situations, solve problems step
by step through trial and error, take into consideration only a few alternatives
and only apply certain assessment criteria at a given time, and keep their
decisions open in order to integrate new information.