Decision Making in Naturalistic Environments

Understanding how experts are able to manage the complexity of modern work environments can inform the strategies and tools used to develop and support effective performance. To that end, this chapter provides a comprehensive review of naturalistic decision making (NDM) research for industrial and organizational (I/O) psychologists. The community of NDM researchers focuses on understanding how experts use their experience to make good decisions in complex real-world situations characterized by stress and uncertainty. NDM and the study of expertise in real-world settings is a rich scientific and practically relevant research area that has yet to be integrated with the I/O field. This chapter is intended to facilitate this cross-fertilization of perspectives. In this chapter, six specific goals are addressed: (a) definitions of the core features of NDM as a field of inquiry as well as the fundamental issues in the domain are reviewed; (b) an introduction to the fundamental theoretical perspectives in NDM is provided; (c) perspectives on the methodological approaches employed in the process of understanding complex cognition in the real world are summarized; (d) NDM research findings are synthesized and presented as a set of performance mechanisms of expert individual and team decision making; (e) applications of NDM research to improving decision-making performance in organizations are reviewed with specific attention to training the expert decision maker; and (f) future directions for NDM as a field of inquiry are outlined.