Three Roads to Commitment: A Trimodal Theory of Decision Making

Three Roads to Commitment: A Trimodal Theory of Decision Making 7
section.
In the research literature, choosing lingers on as a generic description, even in naturalistic analyses that
explicitly acknowledge other processes. (It is sometimes said, for example, that a decision maker “chooses” to
perform a rule-based response, or “chooses” no go over go.) TDM enables us to say, more accurately, that the
decision maker commits to an action and rejects commitment to an action – or with even less baggage, that an action
commitment is created, increases, decreases, or is rejected. This is more than linguistic. A broader conception of
decisions highlights a crucial question in naturalistic research: How and why do commitments change
THREE MODES OF DECISION MAKING
This conceptualization of decision making prompts recognition of three maximally simple ways commitments
can change: by increasing, decreasing, or focusing strength – or, in discrete terms, by adding, rejecting, or selecting
among constraints on action. Corresponding to these operations, a decision cycle may ask, respectively: What should
I do (where the answer must be a degree of commitment noticeably more specific or comprehensive than the
starting state), Is this course of action reliable (where the answer is to reduce the specificity or scope of the starting
commitment if it does not meet challenges, otherwise to retain it), or Which course of action is best (where the
answer is to select, or reallocate preference to, one from the set of alternatives, whose specificity and scope are
unaffected). The three operations apply to different initial states of commitment, which we will simplify by
subtracting commitments that are unaffected. The first applies before any commitment exists, i.e., null, and relative
to which increases are occurring; the second applies after commitment is established, i.e., full, and relative to which
decreases may occur; and the third occurs when the decision maker is committed to a mutually exclusive set, i.e., a
disjunction, relative to which a selection must occur before action.
We argue that these transitions are more than a formal scheme. By regarding them as distinct prototypes or
modes of decision making, we gain extensive empirical coverage and richness by relatively parsimonious means.
Three lines of argument underpin this claim. First, these three modes are associated with qualitatively distinctive
phenomenologies of thinking and acting, i.e., deep differences in the ways they justify actions and in the actions
they justify, and these are associated in turn with importantly different functionalities and priorities. This argument
is the focus of the present section. Second, they provide a set of building blocks for the description and analysis of a
comprehensive range of real world decisions; for example, planning need not be regarded as a distinct mode because
it is accounted for a mix of more fundamental processes. As a corollary, they shed light on relationships, strengths,
and weaknesses of existing decision research paradigms. The following section, “Decision Strategies as Paths to