Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices

By Baruch Fischhoff

A lively, authoritative insider's account of how we make decisions and how decision-making research has developed over the last half century.

Decisions describes the evolution of decision science (also called behavioral decision research and related to behavioral economics) through its application to challenging personal and public policy decisions, since the inception of the field.

Baruch Fischhoff covers all major topics in basic research, including how people create options, determine what matters to them, evaluate their chances of achieving those goals, and engage their emotions. He shows how those processes play out in an exceptionally wide variety of decisions regarding health (including trauma triage and pandemic diseases); safety (including accidents and interpersonal violence); the environment (including climate change and energy); disasters (including tornadoes and floods); and national security (including terrorism and intelligence analysis), among other topics. He also examines how decision-making abilities vary across individuals and across the lifespan, as well as the ethics and politics of how research is conducted and its results are shared and applied.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262553163
• ISBN13: 9780262553162
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 214 Pages