How Can Decision Making Be Improved? 1 Running Head: HOW CAN DECISION MAKING BE IMPROVED? How Can Decision Making Be Improved?

The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to fifty years of research by judgment and decision making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded. This paper argues that the time has come to focus attention on the search for strategies that will improve bounded judgment because decision making errors are costly and are growing more costly, decision makers are receptive, and academic insights are sure to follow from research on improvement. In addition to calling for research on improvement strategies, this paper organizes the existing literature pertaining to improvement strategies, highlighting promising directions for future research. Acknowledgements: We thank Katie Shonk and Elizabeth Weiss for their assistance. How Can Decision Making Be Improved? 3 Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others have clarified the specific ways in which decision makers are likely to be biased. As a result, we can now describe how people make decisions with astonishing detail and reliability. Furthermore, thanks to the normative models of economic theory, we have a clear vision of how much better decision making could be. If we all behaved optimally, costs and benefits would always be accurately weighed, impatience would not exist, no relevant information would ever be overlooked, and moral behavior would always be aligned with moral attitudes. Unfortunately, we have little understanding of how to help people overcome their many biases and behave optimally. The Big Question We propose that the time has come to move the study of biases in judgment and decision making beyond description and toward the development of improvement strategies. While a few important insights about how to improve decision making have already been identified, we argue that many others await discovery. We hope judgment and decision-making scholars will focus their attention on the search for improvement strategies in the coming years, seeking to answer the question: how can we improve decision making? Why the Question Is Important