![]() Thus, this review considers the individual in a social context in two ways. However, the focus of this article is on the link between the behavioral revolution's psychological focus on individual shortcomings and the social context in which information flows between people. Many reviews exist of group decisions, and this review will touch briefly on some of these ideas. Most organizational decisions, however, are fundamentally social: Multiple people participate, multiple people are affected, and one person's thinking is influenced by the thinking of others. At the heart of this work is a focus on cognitive heuristics that reside inside the head of single individuals these mental shortcuts simplify but distort individual judgment. The tradition of behavioral research on decision making, however, often treats the decision process as a highly individual one. ![]() The insights from this perspective have now spread widely across many fields, including organizational behavior, strategy, finance, marketing, medicine, and law. These processes are very efficient but prone to systematic biases. A great deal of decision making depends on fast, intuitive, emotional reactions. Kahneman (2011) summarized this view in the title of his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Behavioral decision research has identified numerous systematic limitations in rationality and has offered a rich understanding of the actual cognitive processes that guide decisions ( Kahneman 2011). However, the limitations of this view were gradually revealed over the past 50 years. Early research on decision making started with a rational view of individual decision making in which a decision maker gathers complete information and maximizes a quantifiable outcome. There has been an explosion of academic research on decision making in recent decades ( Kahneman 2011, Thaler & Sunstein 2008). An enduring set of questions arise around decision making: How good are people at making decisions? What affects their decision-making process? How can their decisions be improved? The ability to make good decisions is one of the fundamental building blocks of organizations. From an organizational perspective, it is desirable for managers to make good decisions, where a good decision is one that on average yields outcomes helpful to the firm and that is arrived at in a reasonably timely fashion. ![]() Organizational life is full of decisions: who to hire, what new project to pursue, what distribution process to adopt in a new market.
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