Tags: Hot Action & Decision Making; Decision Making Model; Fast & Frugal Cognition; Decision making 101; Cognitive Load; Individual Ability Vs Cognitive Diversity; Heuristics
Human’s are rationally bounded, consider the following questions through the lens of athletes playing sport, practitioners operating within a sport and coaches on the side lines, training field or in meetings:
- Is it possible to account for every possible variable when applying logic to a problem or situation?
- When making decisions in ‘real world’ situations do you have an endless amount of time to consider all the scenarios and outcomes?
- Do you have ‘endless processing power’ and ‘limitless processing speed’ when trying to decide a course of action or when you need to make a call in the heat of action?
- When under pressure or emotionally compromised, are you able to completely detach yourself and make a fully logical and rational decision?
Herbert Simon likened human decision making to the cut of a pair of scissors. One blade represents ‘context’ whilst the other would be individual cognition. The cut, to be ecologically rational must account for both. In behavioral economics, cognitive and behavioral psychology significant work has been done to understand decision making.
Significant for Sport Coaches and Practitioners
- Gary Klien – Naturalistic Decision Making & Intuition
- Kahnehman and Tversky – Heuristics; Biases & Systematic Errors Programme
- Gerard Gigerenzer – Fast and Frugal Heuristics
- Vermon Smith – Ecological systems and evolutionary decision making
How could Coaches and Practitioners use decision making science to support them in their practice? Should we consider the player/athletes decision making process and the outcome of their decisions as a fundamental component of the training process, especially if we agree that better decision making under significant pressure is a key ‘performance outcome’ indicator?
- Is the MDTs practice ecologically ‘valid’? How has practice evolved, within or out with the environment, within the sport or within the professional practice domain ? If within the environment/sport
- Is the MDT’s practice self-fulfilling and as such have low inherent validity and immunity from external scrutiny? Does this matter?
- Does a practitioners professional training support ecologically rational practice or does this emerge from the context? If yes
- Does the MDT shape its practice to fit the sport/the coach or athlete and their rituals/beliefs and standpoint? If yes
- Does this limit the validity of the professional decision making within context and potentially reduce performance impact?
For Practitioners and Coaches, should we focus attention on the cultural backdrop we operate within and the behaviour this reinforces? If context, social norms and the environment have an influence on decision making it is probably important that we acknowledge how we operate but also the ecology we operate in. Do we unwittingly overlook the importance of being able to make agile decisions that are contextually appropriate? Perhaps we need to revisit the science of decision making acknowledging that we are rationally bounded and give more weight to the complexity of human performance within a moment, a context and the ecology surrounding it.
This might make for better decisions that we can more fully understand.