ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the history of naturalistic decision making (NDM) as a community of practice and describes its stance concerning cognitive work and research methodology. It provides the history of the concept of macrocognition and shows how NDM converges with it philosophically. Leading experimental psychology journals are still populated by studies of interest to fairly small groups of people who use particular micro-paradigms. The mission of NDM—to understand how people make decisions under difficult conditions, and how to help them do a better job—meant that researchers could not confine themselves to particular tried-and-true paradigms or stovepiped "fundamental mental operations." The chapter discusses the macro–micro distinction by noting the "isms": Macrocognition involves naturalism, functionalism, and phenomenalism; microcognition involves experimentalism, formalism, and reductionism. It shows that the most important "ism," one that micro-and macrocognition share: empiricism. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
