Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices

A lively, authoritative insider’s account of how we make decisions and how decision-making research has developed over the last half century.

Decisions describes the evolution of decision science (also called behavioral decision research and related to behavioral economics) through its application to challenging personal and public policy decisions, since the inception of the field.

Baruch Fischhoff covers all major topics in basic research, including how people create options, determine what matters to them, evaluate their chances of achieving those goals, and engage their emotions. He shows how those processes play out in an exceptionally wide variety of decisions regarding health, safety, the environment, disasters, and national security, among other topics. He also examines how decision-making abilities vary across individuals and across the lifespan, as well as the ethics and politics of how research is conducted and its results are shared and applied.

Baruch Fischhoff is an internationally known scientist, studying basic and applied decision making. A long-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.