Decision Making

Making decisions is something every one of us do every day. Our inner dialouge from "What shall I have for breakfast?" to "How will I get to work this morning?" or even "Should I make dinner or check my Facebook wall?" is just a big stream of decisions that have to be made. Of course we do not actively mull over and process every single decision that we make, but by in large everything we do, we pretty much chose to do it over some other activity. At the heart of my research stream is the fundamental belief that everything we do is the result of a choice.

It is also well known that humans are not the most rational of decision makers. Most of us asipre to be rational decision makers, but we fall short for any number of reasons. Either we missed some relevant fact, or we were not aware of some portion of the problem, or we might consciously choose to do something irrational. There are a multitude of reasons why logic does not rule the day in our decision making.

Even with the best technological aids, and the most thorough analysis of a problem humans still have to make decisions, and given the same information and access to the same information, individuals will still vary in the decisions they make. I find that endlessly fascinating, and I have two broad search streams dedicated to understanding how individuals make decisions.

Information Search

My information search stream started with an investigation into what types of sources individuals use to find information. At the most basic level the decision is between a thing and another individual. My coauthors and I called these relational and nonrelational information sources.

The claim that indivduals prefer to consult relational sources is well documented in the literature. My recent research has focused on capturing what makes interacting with a relational source so appealing and transferring it to a nonrelational source. In other words developing an inanimate source that individuals will relate to as if they were interacting with another person--a concept I call relationalism.

Future research will take these sources that are high in relationalism, and see how individuals interact with them. Of course an information source is only as good as the decisions it enables an individual to make. I plan to investigate how individuals extract information from these sources.

Ethical Lapses

My interest in ethical lapses just recently started developing. Working at a Jesuit liberal arts school, students take several ethics classes before graduating. This requirement is not unique to Jesuit schools, all business schools require students to take ethics courses. So why is it that some individuals behave unethically? I don't claim to know the answer, but I do want to understand more of the problem.

What we do know is that under certain circumstances individuals are more likely to behave unethically. What is still required is further analysis of how these situations arise, how do individuals react in them, and is there anything systems designers can do to alleviate these situations.

As with any technological implementation, designers need to walk a fine line between enabling individuals and inhibiting them. I want to investigate where these boundaries are, and offer better guidance to developers based on my findings.