Anthropology and decision making

Abstract

This article, part of a set of three articles, calls for a critical reexamination of a plethora of phenomena relating to choice and decision making, occasionally addressed by anthropologists, but more regularly studied by economists, political scientists, psychologists, and organization scholars. By means of a bird'seye research overview, we identify certain weak spots pertaining to a formalistic unicentral view of human rationality, and argue that ethnographic approaches casting light on cultural contexts for thought, reason, and action can explain how choices are framed and constituted from horizons of perceptions and expectations. A positive account of socially and culturally embedded decision making heralds a mode of anthropology with a broad, integrating capacity to address public policy and administration and their interactions with everyday experience and practice.

Rethinking indoor climate control in historic buildings: The importance of negotiated priorities and discursive hegemony at a Swedish museum

“…This case study is an example of the difference between this ideal image of decision making and the much more messy and opaque process found in practice [13].…”

“…This varying degree of priority among the three main rationales for climate control could be described as a hierarchy, with 'preservation' at the top, 'energy' at the bottom, and 'comfort' somewhere in between. The two last are clearly subordinate to the preservation task, and all interviewees seem to share this basic horizon of perception, framing their expectations for what is considered possible to achieve and decide upon [13].…”

“…However, several studies have shown that decision processes in organizations can hardly be understood in terms of the traditional perspective [11,12]. Not only are decisions hard to pin down empirically, their relationships to other constructs such as choice, determination and action are far from the ready-made account suggested by normative decision theory [11][12][13].…”

“…For each individual or professional group, choices are framed, not only by their varying roles and responsibilities, but by varying experiences, and horizons of perceptions and expectations [13]. Consequently, when decisions evolve through interaction within or between organizations or professional groups, the varying perceptions and practices need to be considered in each particular case.…”

When general practitioners meet new evidence: an exploratory ethnographic study

“…There ‘is no comprehensive understanding or theory as to how choices are made by physicians’ [ 19 ] nor has the subject of choice and decision making in general ‘received proper scholarly attention among anthropologists’ [ 20 ]. However, the presence of spontaneous reactions along with more delayed reactions is in line with the work of Daniel Kahneman who described human decision-making as driven by two systems: System 1 that is fast, intuitive and emotional, and System 2 that is slower, more deliberative and more logical [ 21 ].…”