Naturalistic decision-making

The naturalistic decision making (NDM) framework emerged as a means of studying how people make decisions and perform cognitively complex functions in demanding, real-world situations. These include situations marked by limited time, uncertainty, high stakes, team and organizational constraints, unstable conditions, and varying amounts of experience.

The NDM movement originated at a conference in Dayton, Ohio in 1989, which resulted in a book by Gary Klein, Judith Orasanu, Roberta Calderwood, and Caroline Zsambok. Since then, NDM conferences have been held every 2–3 years, alternating between U.S. and European venues. A series of NDM books have been published, and in 1995 the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society established a new technical group, Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, that has built on the NDM tradition.

Decision researchers had conducted experiments and developed models for decades prior to the emergence of NDM in 1989. The first NDM researchers went against the norm because they knew there were better ways of making decisions. The heuristics and biases paradigm (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982) proves this. It demonstrated how people did not adhere to the principles of optimal performance; respondents relied on heuristic as opposed to algorithmic strategies even when these strategies generated systematic deviations from optimal judgments as defined by the laws of probability, the axioms of expected utility theory, and Bayesian statistics. This proves that people defy the laws of probability when making decisions. The first NDM researchers went with this approach. Instead of beginning with formal models of decision making, they began by conducting field research to try to discover the strategies people used. Instead of looking for ways that people were suboptimal, they wanted to find out how people were able to make tough decisions under difficult conditions.

The NDM framework focuses on cognitive functions such as decision making, sensemaking, situational awareness, planning – which emerge in natural settings and take forms that are not easily replicated in the laboratory. For example, it is difficult to replicate high stakes, or provide for problem detection, or to achieve extremely high levels of expertise, or to realistically incorporate team and organizational constraints. Therefore, NDM researchers rely on cognitive field research methods such as task analysis to observe and study skilled performers. From the perspective of scientific methodology, NDM studies usually address the initial stages of observing phenomena and developing descriptive accounts. In contrast, controlled laboratory studies emphasize the testing of hypotheses. NDM and controlled experimentation are thus complementary approaches. NDM provides the observations and models, and controlled experimentation provides the testing and formalization.

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