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(MIT Press, ISBN 0262112272)
Gary Klein's book is more accurately described by its subtitle, How People Make Decisions. It's a description of his investigations into that topic which he developed through interviews with firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and other experts who have to make important decisions under pressure.
On one level, the findings are what common sense would suggest - experts intuitively know what to do when presented with situations. The interest of the book stems from two things - one is that the naturalistic decision making model that Klein presents is strongly at variance with theories of how we "ought" ideally to make decisions - ie by weighing all the options and finding reasons why our actual course of action is the best possible. This suggests that perhaps something is wrong with the rationalistic model, at least in cases where experts are dealing with their domain of expertise. Secondly, Klein is able to analyse the components of expertise into factors that we can all learn from and possibly thereby learn to make better decisions.
The book is full of interesting, real-life examples of decision making - what happens when things go wrong, how people sometimes can intuit the right thing to do even in adverse circumstances. There's a lot here to think about, and it's definitely a book I'll be coming back to for another browse.
Posted by MFreestone at February 5, 2004 10:22 PM