Book Reviews

NDM: the challenge to JDM

NATURALISTIC DECISION MAKING. (Edited byZsambok, C. E. and Klein, G.) Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, 1997. 414 pp. ISBN 0-8058-1873-1 (hc),ISBN 0-8058-1874-X (pb).

Review by Henry Montgomery, Department of Psy-chology, Stockholm University, S-10691 Stockholm,Sweden.

For several decades, research in judgment and decisionmaking (JDM) has developed into an establishedsubdiscipline of psychology with its own paradigms,key researchers, conferences and journals. In recentyears a challenger has entered the stage: the naturalisticdecision-making (NDM) movement. The typicalNDM researcher studies how professionals use theirknowledge to make decisions in natural environments,often under stress. In contrast to JDM research, theemphasis is on the use of speci®c knowledge (rather thanon general principles for choosing between givenoptions) and on ®eld studies (rather than experimentalstudies).NDM research is not well represented in the JDM

literature. A literature search in Psychlit for the periodof 1989±1998 gave only 42 hits for the term `naturalisticdecision making'. The large majority of these hits camefrom books and book chapters written by researchersfrom the NDM research community rather than fromarticles in the established JDM journals. In the samevein, NDM research was not even mentioned in themost recent Annual Review chapter on judgment anddecision making. However, other indicators reveal anincreasing interest in NDM research. The most recentNDM conference (in Airlie, USA) attracted about asmany participants as the SPUDM conference in Leeds.And the research money is pouring in, especially fromUS military research funds (at least $25 million until1997 according to informal estimates).In 19893 an edited volume on naturalistic decision

making was published, which was based on the ®rstconference on naturalistic decision making in 1989.This review concerns a volume based on the secondconference on naturalistic decision making held inDayton, Ohio, 1994. This volumewith its 414 pages and

35 chapters o�ers a rich opportunity to obtain anoverview of the progression of the NDM movementsince its inception in the late 1980s. NDM research isexempli®ed and discussed from several perspectives,such as applied areas (e.g. military command, aviation,medical practice, business), theoretical and methodo-logical frameworks, relationships to neighbouringand (rivalling) research areas, and also from criticaland even self-critical perspectives. Some chapters aregeneral overviews whereas other chapters give morespeci®c snapshots. Examples of applied areas are: `Thedecision-making expertise of battle commanders' (byDaniel Sefarty, Jean MacMillan, Elliot E. Entin, andEilee B. Entin), `Capturing and modelling planningexpertise in anaesthesiology: Results of a ®eld study'.(by Yan Xiao, Paul Milgram, and D. John Doyle). Anexample from a theoretical-methodological frameworkis `Schemata and mental models in recognition primeddecision making' (by Ranan Lipschitz and Orit BenShaul).All chapters are written in a condensed and clear

language. It is evident that this book has been verycarefully edited. It would not be unjusti®ed to call thisvolume a handbook of NDM research.As noted byGaryKlein in his concluding chapter, the

critique against NDM research has followed twomutually contradictory lines: (1) NDM research doesnot deal with decision making, but problem solving orecological psychology. (2) NDM research concernsdecisionmaking but it does not addmuch new towhat isalready known. Obviously, assertions (1) and (2) cannotbe simultaneously true, but they can be simultaneouslyfalse. In my opinion, the book presents a strong caseagainst both assertions. Several chapters support abroader view of decision making than the `traditional'focus on how people choose between behavioraloptions. There is still a focus on choice, but not prima-rily on choice among behavioral options, but withrespect to how one should think about the decisionsituation. According to the subject index, the mostfrequently mentioned concept in the book is `situationawareness', which roughly means understanding thesituation. It is clear that several of the theories in thebook assume that the crucial moment of a decision

Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of Behavioral Decision MakingJ. Behav. Dec. Making, 12: 340±342 (1999)

process is whether or not the actor has found a goodenough understanding of the situation or not. Thisunderstanding may occur automatically, although thedecision makers choose and/or critically evaluate theirunderstanding (as is stressed by several authors, e.g.Cohen et al., Klein). It should be noted that `choice' inNDM research cannot be seen as the solving of a well-de®ned problem, since the problem is not to ®nd aprede®ned correct answer but to ®nd a ground for e�-cient action. In the book the concept of `situationawareness' is clari®ed by linking it to di�erent types ofknowledge representations such as mental models, sche-mata, and stories. Process models are presented for howthe decision maker develops his or her understanding interms of these components (see e.g. chapters by Cohenet al.; Klein; Lipshitz and Ben Shaul; Serfaty et al.).These models tend to be richer and more closely relatedto empirical applications than was the case in the ®rstNDM volume.As I see it, the focus on `situation awareness'

represents a serious challenge to JDM research. TheNDM view on decision-making may be seen as stressingan `early' choice of a suitable representation of one ormore options whereas the JDM concerns a `late' choiceof given behavioral options. The two views are largelyincompatible with each other, partly because NDMresearch typically assumes another type of representa-tion of the decision situation (in terms of schemas,mental models, stories etc, which form meaningfulwholes,) as compared to the decision matrixes typicallyassumed in JDMresearch. It is an empirical question forfuture research to compare the validity of these views indi�erent applied areas. Such research could bene®t from

several chapters in the book which discuss how NDM isrelated to JDM (e.g. chapters by Lipshitz and Smith).It may be noted that the NDM vocabulary has a

familiar ring. Schemas, mental models, etc. are well-known terms in cognitive psychology. In general, themodels described in the book can be seen as cognitiveinformation-processing models. However, in contrastto most `old-fashioned' cognitive models these modelsare always adapted to a naturalistic task environment.Perhaps NDM research will pave the way for a break-through of applied cognitive psychology in professionaldecision making.Finally, I would like to take up aspects of naturalistic

decision making which are not discussed extensively inthe book but still may be of importance for under-standing and training professional decision makers.First, I did not ®nd any discussion of the role of `hot'psychological factors in NDM as opposed to the `cold'cognitive processes and structures focused in the book.Professional decision makers are also victims of socialin¯uences. They are guided by emotions, interests andvalues. Sometimes their thinking is driven by defensivemotives rather than by accuracy. Awareness of suchfactors and being skilled in controlling them may be animportant ingredient in naturalistic decision making.Second, none of the contributions in the book discussesthe role of dynamic system factors such as time delaysand feedback resulting from repeated decisions inchanging environments (the chapter by Mica Endsleytouches on this issue). However, these ®nal remarks donot change my evaluation of the book as giving avery readable and challenging overview of the NDMmovement.

Project planning and multi-criteria analysis

FUZZY LOGIC FOR PLANNING ANDDECISION MAKING. Lootsma, F.A., Dordrecht:Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. 195 pp. ISBN0-7923-4681-5.

Review by H.-J. Zimmermann, Department ofOperations Research, Aachen Institute of Technology,Templergraben 64, D-52062 Aachen, Germany.

This is really a fascinating book. Unlike many otherbooks on planning and decision making it does notdescribe available methods for this area but it ratherre¯ects their background, it builds the bridges betweenformal algorithms and underlying psychological andempirical scienti®c results and it compares alternativeways of planning and decision making.

In this book project planning, certainly one of theoldest planning areas in operations research, is chosen asan example. An easy-to-understand example is used todescribe the procedure of the critical path method,which here is considered to be a deterministic `PERT'plan. Even if readers are not familiar with that type ofplanning, they will easily understand the basic prin-ciples. Then uncertainty is introduced and the usualPERT procedure is considered. The original PERTmakes a number of assumptions about the probabilitydistribution of the duration of activities and then usesapproximations in order to determine distribution func-tions of the times of events and also of the project dura-tion. If the usually assumed beta distribution is replacedby a gamma distribution, computations become simplerand the e�ciency increases even more if those prob-

Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Vol. 12, 340±342 (1999)

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