ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a taste of the recent history of judgment and decision-making research. It highlights some of the historical setting for the areas of research. Von Neumann and Morgenstern were interested in the mathematical rather than the behavioural implications of their theorem, but an added result of their axiomatization of expected utility was that it provided researchers with a 'set of rules' for testing the rationality of people's choices. Paul Meehl described how judgments made by experts, usually clinicians were often inferior in terms of accuracy to those generated by simple statistical models provided with the same information. The chapter identifies areas, pathways and biological mechanisms in the brain that underlie decision making. Neuroscience evidence can be used to examine whether and how the brain calculates the 'value' of different options. Alternatively, brain-imaging techniques might be used to draw inferences about the involvement of different systems in 'deliberative' as opposed to 'intuitive' judgments.
