ABSTRACT
The naturalistic approach to decision research takes as its starting point the way people actually make decisions in real-world environments, as revealed in interviews, observation, and contextually realistic experimentation. It does not start with a mathematical or logical model of how decisions ought to be made, nor does it typically compare behavior in artificial laboratory tasks to such models (Cohen, 1993). However, there is more agreement about the starting point of naturalistic research than about its destination. What functions does this research ultimately serve? In particular, can it generate prescriptions about how to think better or make better decisions? Will it eventually arrive where other approaches begin, and lead to training that mitigates the shortcomings of ordinary thinking?
