Three Roads to Commitment: A Trimodal Theory of Decision Making

Three Roads to Commitment: A Trimodal Theory of Decision Making 17
information was received. This must be mistaken if there is one right answer to a decision problem.
But the latter assumption, along with the allegation of bias, can itself be mistaken – especially in complex,
novel situations where reassessment is most needed. In such cases, reassessment “searches” in a landscape that it
must construct as it goes along, without knowledge of the variables and values that will turn out to be relevant, and
which is in any case too large or irregular for anything close to exhaustive exploration. Reassessment adapts to such
problems by starting to search in a relatively familiar neighborhood of causes, predictions, plans, and outcomes,
changing only what looks wrong, and moving to a new neighborhood only when the current one appears beyond
repair (Lindblom, 1959; Braybrooke & Lindblom, 1963; Connolly & Wager, 1988). Reassessment’s bias in favor of
current commitments reflects a reasonable initial judgment about where solutions are likely to be found, hence, it
provides an anchor that improves the prospects of generating new knowledge (Politeik, 2001). More pragmatically,
it is less disruptive of on-going practice, reduces decision making costs, preserves more existing knowledge, and
frees resources for innovation in less risky or disruptive ways. In the context of non-exhaustive search in an illdefined
search space, rational explorers may come to different conclusions because they have different starting
points. Allegations of irrationality and bias need to be reassessed.
The Non-Universality of Choice
In the standard story, choice is not just the dominant type of decision making but it is the only kind, by
definition. In fact, conscious choice may itself be the least indispensable decision mode (a better case may be made
for unconscious allocation of time, as we discuss later). Its functions can be emulated by serial generation and
evaluation of individual actions by matching and reassessment respectively. For example, satisficing, which retains a
course of action if it clears aspiration levels on all evaluative dimensions, is a hybrid of matching and reassessment
that approximates choice, especially if reassessment focuses on consequences. Satisficing performs virtually as well
as optimal choice models when there is a stable set of satisfactory options that do not differ drastically in expected
utility (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996). Genuine conscious choice in TDM requires awareness of a pool of
concurrently available options that start out on a roughly equal footing with respect to the decision (as opposed to
satisficing, and reassessment more generally, where results are highly path-dependent). Decisions tend to be framed
as choice when (a) multiple options are prepackaged for comparison in the environment (e.g., a web site that
provides a table of products by features), (b) cultural or organizational constraints require justification by
comparison with other options (Tetlock, 1996), or (c) goals compete with one another, which is to say that salient
options trade off advantages and disadvantages or compete for scarce resources, and some approximation to