Decision Making: Choosing Among Alternatives • 375Decision Making: Choosing Among Alternatives
As we noted at the beginning of the chapter, we make decisions every day, from rela-
tively unimportant ones (what clothes to wear, what movie to see) to those that can
have great impact on our lives (what college to attend, whom to marry, what job to
choose). The process of decision making can involve both inductive and deductive rea-
soning, so we have already considered some of the principles that apply to the study of
how people make decisions.
When we discussed the availability and representativeness heuristics, we used
examples in which people were asked to make judgments about things like causes of
death or people’s occupations. As we discuss decision making, our emphasis will be on
how people make judgments that involve choices between different courses of action.
These choices may involve personal decisions, such as deciding what school to attend
or whether to fl y or drive to a destination, or decisions made in conjunction with a
profession, such as “Which advertising campaign should my company run?” or “Where
should my law fi rm advertise to fi nd another part-time student worker?” We begin by
considering one of the basic properties of decision making: Decisions involve both
benefi ts and costs.THE UTILITY APPROACH TO DECISIONS
Much of the early theorizing on decision making was infl uenced by expected utility
theory. This theory is based on the assumption that people are basically rational, so
if they have all of the relevant information, they will make a decision that results in
the maximum expected utility. Utility refers to outcomes that achieve a person’s goals
(Manktelow, 1999; Reber, 1995). The economists who studied decision making thought
about utility in terms of monetary value; thus, the goal of good decision making was to
make choices that resulted in the maximum monetary payoff.
One of the advantages of the utility approach is that it specifi es procedures that
make it possible to determine which choice would result in the highest monetary value.
For example, if we know the odds of winning when playing a slot machine in a casino,
and also know the cost of playing and the size of the payoff, it is possible to determine
that, in the long run, playing slot machines is a losing proposition. But just because it is
possible to predict the optimum strategy doesn’t mean that people will follow that strat-
egy. People regularly behave in ways that ignore the optimum way of responding based
on probabilities. Even though most people
realize that in the long run the casino wins,
the huge popularity of gambling indicates
that many people have decided to patron-
ize casinos anyway. Observations such as
this, as well as the results of many experi-
ments, have led psychologists to conclude
that people do not always make decisions
that result in the desired outcome.
Here are some additional examples of
situations in which people’s decisions do
not maximize the probability of a good out-
come. Veronica Denes-Raj and Seymour
Epstein (1994) offered participants the
opportunity to earn up to $7 by receiving
$1 every time they drew a red jelly bean
from a bowl consisting of red and white
jelly beans. When given a choice between
drawing from a small bowl containing 1
red and 9 white beans (chances of drawing
red = 10 percent; ● Figure 13.8a) or from a(a) 1 out of 10 red
Odds = 10%(b) 7 out of 100 red
Odds = 7%●FIGURE 13.8 Denes-Raj and Epstein (1994) gave participants a choice between
randomly picking one jelly bean from (a) a bowl with 1 red bean and 9 white beans or
(b) a bowl with 7 red beans and 93 white beans (not all of the white beans are shown
in this picture). Participants received money if they picked a red bean. (Source: Based on
V. Denes-Raj & S. Epstein, “Confl ict Between Intuitive and Rational Processing: When People Behave
Against Their Better Judgment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 819–829, 1994.)Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.