ABSTRACT
Discussions of the origins of the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) paradigm appear in Klein, Orasanu, Calderwood, and Zsambok (1993); Moon (2002); and Ross and Shafer (2006). NDM as a community of practice has no formal society but is sustained by meetings and common interests. It began with the first conference in 1989 in Dayton, Ohio, at which a group of researchers who were studying diἀerent domains for diἀerent reasons found a common and seemingly distinctive set of goals and methods. At that meeting, Judith Orasanu, a leading human factors psychologist at NASA, laid out the key features of the NDM attempt to “redefine decision making” (Orasanu & Connolly, 1993) through the study of real-world decision making by domain experts working at challenging tasks that that are dynamic, ill structured, and high stakes. The 1989 meeting was intended as a workshop to allow sharing of results and interests, but it sparked demand for follow-on gatherings. The NDM community has met every 2 or 3 years since then, alternating between North American and European venues. Each of the NDM meetings has generated a book describing the research and the ideas of the conference participants (Flin, Salas, Strub, & Martin, 1997; Hoἀman, 2007; Klein et al., 1993; Montgomery, Lipshitz, & Brehmer, 2005; Salas & Klein, 2001; Schraagen, 2008; Schraagen, Militello, Ormerod, & Lipshitz, 2007; Zsambok & Klein, 1997). Many NDM researchers gather every year as part of the Cognitive Ergonomics and Decision Making Technical Group within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and at meetings on situation awareness.
