ABSTRACT
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 321 Effects of Time Stress and Uncertainty on Decision Making ....................................................... 322
Other Effects on Human Decision Makers Under Crisis Conditions ................................. 323 Decision-Making Theories ............................................................................................................ 323 Decision-Making Performance Measures .....................................................................................324 Crisis Decision-Making Training .................................................................................................. 325
General and Stress Training ............................................................................................... 325 Simulation .......................................................................................................................... 327 Microworld ......................................................................................................................... 328
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 328 References ..................................................................................................................................... 329
Humans make decisions every day. These range from life-planning decisions, such as whether to take a job after college or go to graduate school, to quotidian decisions about what to eat for lunch. Decision making is a task in which “a person must select one option from a number of alternatives” with “some amount of information available” and under the influence of “time frame” and context uncertainty (Wickens, Lee, Liu, and Becker, 2004). For decisions such as what to eat for lunch, humans can take enough time to consider all the available options, and even if a bad decision is made, the consequence is not significant. Unfortunately, this is not the case when making a decision during a crisis. Decision making in a crisis situation involves time stress and uncertain information and can be an issue of life or death, such as navigating an airplane through severe weather or deciding when to deploy a parachute if the airplane malfunctions in such a situation. Indeed, as Orasanu and Connolly (1993) noted, for crisis decision making, “the stakes are often high and the effects on lives are likely to be significant.”
