Decision-making
cognitive process to choose a course of action or belief
In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rational or irrational. The decision-making process is a reasoning process based on assumptions of values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker. Every decision-making process produces a final choice, which may or may not prompt action.
Research about decision-making is also published under the label problem solving, particularly in European psychological research.
Overview
Decision-making can be regarded as a problem-solving activity yielding a solution deemed to be optimal, or at least satisfactory. It is therefore a process which can be more or less rational or irrational and can be based on explicit or tacit knowledge and beliefs. Tacit knowledge is often used to fill the gaps in complex decision-making processes. Usually, both of these types of knowledge, tacit and explicit, are used together in the decision-making process.
Human performance has been the subject of active research from several perspectives:
Psychological: examining individual decisions in the context of a set of needs, preferences and values the individual has or seeks.
The public source identifies “Decision-making” as cognitive process to choose a course of action or belief. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Decision-making, cognitive and process.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1331926. The Library of Congress control number is sh85036199. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Decision-making” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.