Cognitive Mechanisms In Naturalistic Decision Making And The Implications For Leadership Training

The focus of the present research is the character of cognitive mechanisms of decision making of a person with experience and knowledge in a real dynamic situation when the goal and the problem are not clear.In the line of three research paradigms shift, the thesis first sorts out the main theories of decision making in the direction of logic history of the development of decision making science. Classic decision making research has gone through two paradigms which are normal—positivism and rationalism, the purpose of the research during these period mostly are pursuing normative methods to analyze decisions, establishing reliable expressions to describe decisions, using the statistic model to describe the bias of human mind, or revealing the limitations of the mind of human beings. The training based on traditional decision making research attach much importance on teaching normative methods of decision making, try to correct and overcome the limitations of human mind. Traditional decision making research is incompatible with the characters of decision making in the real world. There are two reasons: firstly, traditional decision making research didn't consider the character of the naturalistic situation as pressure and uncertainty of information. Secondly, traditional decision making research didn't take the character of decision makers into account, including experience and personal values etc. Naturalistic decision making research has opened a new way to explore the laws of the thinking of decision making in real world by reverting the factors being abstracted in the past.If factors as time, difficulty of task, importance of the outcome cause pressure on decision makers, experience will strongly affect the whole process of thinking. In the second paragraph, firstly, characters of recognition primed decision making are analyzed in comparing with traditional theories, then three basic procedure which are situation assessing, recognition, mental simulation in recognition primed decision making are discussed, finally, effects of experience on obtaining information, identifying problems and setting up goals are argued with a case study of decision making by farmers.Traditional decision making theories attach much importance on domain-general cognitive mechanisms like computing, analyzing and inferring, in the third chapter, experiment is arranged to reveal the fact that decision makers rely on the medi-representation formed by explaining evidence, not the evidence itself. The cognitive mechanism to form this representation is domain-specific.According to traditional decision making research, the goal is to optimize the outcome, but in the real world, decision making often concerns private emotions and principles, they are also knowledge structures which restrict the behaviors of decision makers. The fourth chapter discusses the meaning of images first, analyzes three mental testing procedures in images. Then by doing experiments of choosing jobs, the chapter reveals the basic laws and characters of compatibility test.On the basis of reviewing experience based decision making, integrating information and image filtering these three cognitive mechanisms in naturalistic settings which are closely related with decision making by leaders, in chapter five, starts from summing up the characters of naturalistic situation and naturalistic process of decision making, argues the ideas, methods and goals of decision making training. Affected by the factors like time limitation etc., decision makers always have pressure in the process of making decisions, the uncertainties in naturalistic setting are different from those in traditional decision making theories. Natural decision making isn't linear, decision making can't be taken as pure selection, identifying situation is more important. The logic in decision is different from formal logic. The training should concern those characters of naturalistic decision making including pressure and organizational cooperation, and should integrate domain-general, domain-specific and meta-decision making skills. The goals of training can be achieved only if the learner accomplished three levels of transformation, which is from grasping the method of making decisions at the level of concept to enhancing the ability of making decisions.