Suppose that a high school senior has been admitted by two colleges - a prestigious university in New Haven and a community college in Hawaii. How would she go about deciding which offer to accept? One possibility is that she carefully calculates the costs and benefits of both alternatives and chooses the one she concludes to have the greater net benefit. Another possibility is that she thinks about reasons for and against attending either school and chooses the option that she can best justify to herself and others. A third possibility is that she simply bases her choice on her gut feelings about which alternative would be "better." These are just some of the possible ways she can resolve the decision. We refer to these different ways of making decisions as "decision modes." Use of different decision modes can lead to different choices and thereby to different levels of satisfaction with the decision, after it is made and consequences are experienced. The standard decision literature has focused primarily on the cost-benefit mode of decision-making, but recent research in psychology suggests that people often use other decision modes, including the justification-based and feelings-based modes we described. In this project, we seek to accomplish two main objectives: 1) to systematically identify what decision modes people commonly use, and 2) to formulate a theory that can help us predict under what conditions people will use what decision mode. Based on our own work and that of other scholars, we speculate that the answers to the second question depend on issues such as the motivation and the cultural background of the decision-maker, and the nature and the context of the decision problem. We hope that, eventually, our work will not only predict when people use what decision mode, but will also provide constructive advice to decision-makers (such as the student mentioned earlier) as to which decision mode to use under a given situation, and thereby help them make the best decision -- the one with outcomes that will make them happiest in the long run.
