Psycho-Physical Factors of the Decision Making Process

Abstract

Choice situations in everyday life usually are characterized by some degree of uncertainty or risk, which means, that it is not possible to properly assess not only the set of feasible strategies, but also, and perhaps above all, to determine the possible outcomes to achieve. Classical decision models, emphasizing high rationality, are being frequently criticized due to the fact that a single subject has no capabilities to assess the enormous amount of substantial data provided to him by senses and elaborated though reasoning (Goodwin, Wright, Tyszka 2011). A decision made in such circumstances involve at least a potential loss, and thus it may trigger in a decision maker an aversion to the risk (or the uncertainty). George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Schiller in their book (Akerlof, Schiller 2009) would like to see the above mentioned phenomenon, and consequences of such behaviour, as an effect of animal spirits, mistakenly understood as some mysterious forces manifested mainly in fallacious and premature decisions made each day on the global market. Of course, a detailed analysis might be, in some circumstances, beneficial at the micro-scale, however in many other macroscopic analyses some simplifications and generalizations are indispensable. On the other hand mechanisms responsible for the reduction in information material have a biological character and constitute the natural endowment of human beings, thus excluding them from the analysis that distorts the shape of decision models and, therefore, their adequacy in the context of real decisive problems.