12 Cognitive Psychology: Module 23

Module 23: Decision Making According to the different levels of consequences, each process of making a decision requires appropriate effort and various aspects to be considered. The following excerpt from the story about Perry makes this obvious: “After considering facts like the warm weather in Mexico and shirts and shorts being much more comfortable in this case (information gathering and likelihood estimation) Perry reasons that he needs them for his vacation. In consequence, he finally makes the decision to pack mainly shirts and shorts in his bag (final act of choosing).” Now it seems like there cannot be any decision making without previous reasoning, but that is not true. Of course, there are situations in which someone decides to do something spontaneously, with no time to reason about it. We will not go into detail here, but you might think about questions like "Why do we choose one or another option in that case?"