Decision Making and the Search for Fundamental Psychological Regularities: What Can Be Learned from a Process Perspective?

This article starts with a description of decision research in the past as a development towards an understanding of decision making as a process in which a decision maker's decision rules and problem representations interact in the creation of a final choice. The Differentiation and Consolidation Theory (Svenson, 1992) is presented briefly to provide a framework for a discussion of process studies and regularities in human decision processes. Subsequently, recent findings about pre- and postdecision processes are presented followed by some methodological considerations for future decision research. For example, it is argued that within subjects designs should be used whenever possible and that interindividual differences concerning importance of attributes must be accommodated before aggregating group data. The paper ends with a section presenting a number of suggestions of areas and problems deserving more attention and research efforts in the future.