Abstract

The area of behavioral decision research, specifically the work on heuristics and biases, has had a tremendous influence on basic research, applied research, and application over the last twenty-five years. Its unique juxtaposition against economics has provided important benefits, but at the cost of leaving it disconnected from too much of psychology. This paper explores an expanded definition of behavioral decision research through the consideration of multiple levels of cognitive processing. Rather than being limited to how decision-makers depart from optimality, we offer a broader analysis of how decision-makers define the decision problem and link decisions to goals, as well as a more detailed focus on processes associated with implementing decisions. Over the past few decades the area of cognitive psychology has grown dramatically, social and developmental psychology have moved strongly in a cognitive direction, and behavioral decision research (BDR) has emerged as a new area of psychology. BDR is unique among psychological subfields in the impact that it has had on research outside of psychology - including its impact on economics, finance, public policy, law, medicine, marketing, organizational behavior, and negotiation. Unfortunately, BDR has also moved further away from many core areas of psychology, limiting its theoretical development and its integration with advances made in allied areas. Our central thesis is that the most well known part of BDR, the heuristics and biases approach, has been overly constrained by a focus on how people make mistakes at the point of decision. Research on heuristics and biases has implicitly assumed that the goal is known and that the details of implementing decisions are not part of the problem. The prescriptive goal is optim...

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