ABSTRACT
In his critique of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM), Doherty (1993) asserted that "naturalistic decision making is simply silent on what constitutes an error" (p. 380). Later Doherty (personal communication, May 1995) clarified his assertion by raising three questions: What constitutes an error according to the NDM paradigm? Can decision errors conceived this way be detected online without the benefit of hindsight? What is the positive contribution of NDM besides criticism of the treatment of error within the "heuristics and biases" tradition? Although I disagreed with the blanket assertion that NDM is "silent on error" (e.g., Reason, 1990; Woods, Johannesen, Cook, & Sarter, 1994), I thought the questions that Doherty raised were worthy of serious attention. I therefore presented them to a panel of six NDM researchers: Marvin Cohen, Richard Cook, Randall Mumaw, James Shanteau, Alan Stokes, and myself. Based on the panel's discussion and my own reading of the literature, I will try to answer each of Doherty's three questions.
