If you aren't using the term naturalistic decision making, or NDM, you soon will be. Even as a very young field, NDM has already had far-reaching applications in areas as diverse as management, aviation, health care, nuclear power, military command and control, corporate teamwork, and manufacturing. Put simply, NDM is the way people use their experience to make decisions in the context of a job or task. Of particular interest to NDM researchers are the effects of high-stake consequences, shifting goals, incomplete information, time pressure, uncertainty, and other conditions that are present in most of today's work places and that add to the complexity of decision making. Applications of NDM research findings target decision aids and training that help people in their decision-making processes. This book reports the findings of top NDM researchers, as well as many of their current applications. In addition, the book offers a historical perspective on the emergence of this new paradigm, describes recent theoretical and methodological advancements, and points to future developments. It was written for people interested in decision making research and applications relative to a diverse array of work settings and products such as human-computer interfaces, decision support systems, individual and team training, product designs, and organizational development and planning.

Naturalistic Decision Making is an important area of research in applied psychology. This book comes from selected topics at the 1998 conference on NDM, held in Virginia.

This book presents the latest work in the area of naturalistic decision making (NDM) and its extension into the area of macrocognition. It contains 18 chapters relating research centered on the study of expertise in naturalistic settings, written by international experts in NDM and cognitive systems engineering. The objective of the book is to present the reader with exciting new developments in this field of research, which is characterized by its application-oriented focus. The work addresses only real-world problems and issues. For instance, how do multi-national teams collaborate effectively? How can surgeons best be supported by technology? How do detectives make sense of complex criminal cases? In all instances the studies have been carried out on experts within their respective domains. The traditional field of NDM is extended in this work by focusing on macrocognitive functions other than decision making, namely sense-making, coordination and planning. This has broadened the scope of the field. The book also contains a theoretical discussion of the macro-micro distinction. Naturalistic Decision Making and Macrocognition will be relevant to graduate students, researchers and professionals (including professionals and researchers in business, industry and government) who are interested in decision making, expertise, training methods and system design. The material may be used in two ways: theoretically, to advance understanding of the field of naturalistic decision making; and practically, to gain insight into how experts in various domains solve particular problems, understand and deal with issues and collaborate with others.

"Put simply, NDM is the way people use their experience to make decisions in the context of a job or task. Of particular interest to NDM researchers are the effects of high-stake consequences, shifting goal, incomplete information, time pressure, uncertainty, and other conditions that are present in most of today's workplaces and that add to the complexity of decision making. Comppared to more traditional decision research, NDM researchers are more emphatic about studying experienced people either in actual environments or in simulations that preserve contextual dynamics described here. Applications of NDM research target decision aids and training that help people in their decision making process."--Publisher.

This book describes the new perspective of naturalistic decision making. The point of departure is how people make decisions in complex, time-pressured, ambiguous, and changing environments. The purpose of this book is to present and elaborate on past models developed to explain this type of decision making. The central philosophy of the book is that classical decision theory has been unproductive since it is so heavily grounded in economics and mathematics. The contributors believe there is little to be learned from laboratory studies about how people actually handle difficult and interesting tasks; therefore, the book presents a critique of classical decision theory. The models of naturalistic decision making described by the contributors were derived to explain the behavior of firefighters, business people, jurors, nuclear power plant operators, and command-and-control officers. The models are unique in that they address the way people use experience to frame situations and adopt courses of action. The models explain the strengths of skilled decision makers. Naturalistic decision research requires the examination of field settings, and a section of the book covers methods for conducting meaningful research outside the laboratory. In addition, since his approach has applied value, the book covers issues of training and decision support systems.

An overview of naturalistic decision making, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced.

Researchers have revealed that real expertise, while applied to well-defined tasks with highly circumscribed contexts, often stretches beyond its routine boundaries. For example, a medical doctor may be called upon to diagnose a rare disease or perform emergency surgery outside his or her area of specialization because other experts are not availab