Abstract
Concepts of decision, choice, decision-maker, and decision-making are common practical tools in both social science and natural science, on which scientific knowledge, policy implications, and moral recommendations are based. In this article I address three questions. First, I look into how present-day social scientists and natural scientists use decision/choice concepts. What are they used for? Second, scientists may differ in the application of decision/choice to X, and they may explicitly disagree about the applicability of decision/choice to X. Where exactly do these disagreements lie? Third, I ask how scientists should use decision/choice concepts. What are they correctly and incorrectly used for? I argue that scientists must responsibly attend to a methodological demand: you have to have a principled, non-ad hoc, well-argued-for way of telling where decision/choice applicability ends. Thus, I aim to minimize the risk of conceptual stretching and foster responsible conceptual practices in a large body of scientific work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Thanks to a Theory and Society editor and a reviewer for encouraging me to discuss this.
Also, you can find many sociologists who like and many sociologists who dislike decision/choice concepts. Whether the former or the latter predominate is an empirical question, which depends on the subfield and X under consideration. Either way, this internal diversity bolsters my argument that sociology is in a good position to address question (3). For the view that sociologists need more decisions, decision-making, and “judgment and decision-making sciences” in their work, see Bruch and Feinberg (2017), Daipha (2015), and Vaisey and Valentino (2018). For the view that sociologists need fewer decisions in their work, see Meyer (2010, 2017, p. 836): “many researchers studying college attendance formulate their task as analyzing a ‘decision’—a decision they and their subjects probably never made. A number of methodological errors follow, besetting the research tradition involved. Parallel errors characterize much research in the field of organizations: decision analyses of matters never in fact decided. Mistakes routinely follow from the established assumptions that human activity, more or less by definition, follows from choices.”
For some illustrations of non-decisionism and anti-decisionism, inspired by Iris Murdoch, Confucian/Daoist ideas, and sociological/structural ideas, see Abend (2019).
To-do list (1): look at decision/choice in other languages. The concepts under scrutiny are expressed by the English words “decision,” “choice,” “decision-maker,” “decision-making,” “to decide,” “to choose,” “to select,” “to pick,” “to opt,” and the like. Translation may be challenging and its substantive implications are substantial. (While my data are English-language scholarship, I see comparable patterns in French and German. But I may be wrong.) To-do list (2): look at decision/choice in other traditions of thought. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism are promising candidates, due to their understandings of agency and self (Bruya 2010; Collins 1982; Flanagan 2017; Ganeri 2017; Slingerland 2003).
There is an interesting legal analogy here: the requirement that you be informed of your options. If you did not know what your options were, you could not be said to be making a choice. Or, as is sometimes said, you could not be meaningfully said to be making a choice, or you could not be said to be meaningfully making a choice, or you could not be said to be making a meaningful choice. What sort of meaningfulness is this?
For example, in “Inside the Brain of an Elite Athlete,” Yarrow et al. (2009, pp. 589-590) discuss “sports-specific decision making” and specifically “motor decision-making behaviour” as follows: “Motor decision making operates at a number of levels. Any given behaviour needs to integrate decisions across a hierarchy of neural representations and types of control signal. All decisions reflect trade-offs between cost and rewards, and it is possible that similar reinforcement principles operate on multiple reward prediction errors coded in variables that are appropriate to their level in the decision hierarchy.”
Meta-level disagreements that merit empirical, sociological research include: (1) Do explicit decisionists and anti-decisionists take themselves to be disagreeing about language, concepts, reality itself, all of the above, or something else? Can dictionary definitions help? What other methods can be used? (2) What do they take the status of their claims to be? Are they literal or metaphorical? (3) Who views these discussions as time-wasters and why? Shimon, the marimba-playing robot, played a Bb. Who cares if it decided or chose to do so? Who cares if we speak of decision-making in ethology, education, sexual health, psychotherapy, or courts of law? This is a merely semantic, call-it-what-you-want matter. A merely verbal dispute (Chalmers 2011). Stop worrying.
For the sake of simplicity, I am thinking dichotomously: this is a decision, that is not; this is a choice, that is not; this is a decision-maker, that is not. But perhaps we should think of a continuum, fuzzy set, prototype, ideal type, family resemblance, or something else.
I am not making any claims about decision/choice applicability myself. Jones may argue that one criterion is true autonomy, which Deep Blue has, but a calculator does not. And then argue that “true autonomy” means this or that. Juliet may argue that one criterion is complexity threshold T, which Deep Blue meets, but a calculator does not. And then argue that the rationale for T is this or that. Elena may disagree and call these criteria “implausible,” “subjective,” or “arbitrary.” I choose to remain silent (like Deep Blue and calculators often do).
Granted, it is not necessary that very broad concepts be of little use and interest, since usefulness and interestingness are relative; they depend on your perspective and goals. I think very broad decision/choice concepts are seldom useful and interesting. But seldom does not mean never.
And not just your colleagues in your field. As one Theory and Society reviewer observed, “stretching in one field affects all.” What is more, another “victim is ordinary language,” which “falls into absurdities or moral perversity.”
Not that these twelve dimensions are set in stone, like the apostles or the tribes of Israel. I can be convinced that more, or fewer, or others are needed.
I have underscored how using decision/choice concepts has risks. Decisionists are making a consequential conceptual choice, which takes philosophical sides, even if they are not aware of it. But non-decisionists are also making a consequential conceptual choice, which takes philosophical sides, even if they are not aware of it. They are choosing not to use decision/choice to understand and represent X. Maybe this misunderstands and misrepresents X? My argument is in this sense symmetrical.
References
Abend, G. (2008). The Meaning of Theory. Sociological Theory, 26, 173–199.
Abend, G. (2014). The moral background: an inquiry into the history of business ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Abend, G. (2017). What Are Neural Correlates Neural Correlates of? BioSocieties, 12, 415–438.
Abend, G. (2018). Outline of a Sociology of Decisionism. British Journal of Sociology, 69, 237–264.
Abend, G. (2019). Moral Decisionism and its Discontents. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Adams, G., Watson, K., Pearson, J., & Platt, M. (2012). Neuroethology of decision-making. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 22, 982–989.
Anscombe, G.E.M. [1957] (2000). Intention. 2nd edition. Harvard.
Ariely, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2006). The Heat of the Moment. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 87–98.
Baluška, F., & Mancuso, S. (2009). Plant neurobiology: from sensory biology, via plant communication, to social plant behavior. Cognitive Processing, 10, S3–S7.
Berliner, P. (1994). Thinking in Jazz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bhalla, U. (2014). Molecular computation in neurons: a modeling perspective. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 25, 31–37.
Bonnefon, J.-F., et al. (2016). The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. Science, 352, 1573–1576.
Bruch, E., & Feinberg, F. (2017). Decision-Making Processes in Social Contexts. Annual Review of Sociology, 43, 207–227.
Bruya, B. (2010). The Rehabilitation of Spontaneity. Philosophy East and West, 60, 207–250.
Burley, N., & Wilson, M. (1983). Mate choice in plants. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Camic, C. (1986). A Matter of Habit. American Journal of Sociology, 91, 1039–1087.
Cappelen, H. (2018). Fixing language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2011). Verbal Disputes. Philosophical Review, 120, 515–566.
Collier, D., & Mahon, J. (1993). Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited. American Political Science Review, 87, 845–855.
Collins, S. (1982). Selfless persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daipha, P. (2015). Masters of uncertainty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Davidson, D. (2001). Essays on actions and events (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, K., Hendershot, C., George, W., Norris, J., & Heiman, J. (2007). Alcohol’s effects on sexual decision making. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 68, 843–851.
Dewey, J. (1896). The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370.
Dijksterhuis, A. (2004). Think different: the merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 586–598.
Dovidio, J., & Fiske, S. (2012). Under the radar: how unexamined biases in decision-making processes in clinical interactions can contribute to health care disparities. American Journal of Public Health, 102, 945–952.
Doya, K., & Shadlen, M. (2012). Decision making. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 22, 911–913.
Dworkin, R. (1996). Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 25, 87–139.
Figdor, C. (2018). Pieces of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fingarette, H. (1972). Confucius. Long Grove: Waveland Press.
Flanagan, O. (2017). The geography of morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fleck, L. [1935](1979). Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago.
Gabel, C., Gabel, H., Pavlichin, D., Kao, A., Clark, D., & Samuel, A. (2007). Neural circuits mediate electrosensory behavior in Caenorhabditis elegans. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 7586–7596.
Gagliano, M. (2017). The mind of plants: thinking the unthinkable. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 10, e1288333.
Ganeri, J. (2017). Attention, not self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gold, J., & Shadlen, M. (2007). The Neural Basis of Decision Making. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 30, 535–574.
Gold, R., Skinner, M., & Ross, M. (1994). Unprotected anal intercourse in HIV-infected and non-HIV-infected gay men. Journal of Sex Research, 31, 59–77.
Grant, E. (2010). The nature of natural philosophy in the late middle ages. Catholic University of America.
Griffith, S., Pryke, S., & Buttemer, W. (2011). Constrained mate choice in social monogamy and the stress of having an unattractive partner. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 278, 2798–2805.
Gross, N. (2009). A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms. American Sociological Review, 74, 358–379.
Harper, R., Randall, D., & Sharrock, W. (2016). Choice: the sciences of reason in the 21st century: a critical assessment. Cambridge: Polity.
Haslanger, S. (2000). Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be? Noûs, 34, 31–55.
Haslanger, S. (2005). What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds. Hypatia, 20, 10–26.
Heekeren, H., et al. (2004). A general mechanism for perceptual decision-making in the human brain. Nature, 431, 859–862.
Heekeren, H., et al. (2008). The neural systems that mediate human perceptual decision making. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 467–479.
Heimer, C. (2013). Wicked ethics’: compliance work and the practice of ethics in HIV research. Social Science & Medicine, 98, 371–378.
Hoehne, A., Richard-Devantoy, S., Ding, Y., Turecki, G., & Jollant, F. (2015). First-degree relatives of suicide completers may have impaired decision-making but functional cognitive control. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 68, 192–197.
Humphries, M., Gurney, K., & Prescott, T. (2007). Is there a brainstem substrate for action selection? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362, 1627–1639.
Huxley, A. (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley. New York: Harper & Row.
Johnson, J. (2006). Cognitive modeling of decision making in sports. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 7, 631–652.
Johnson, J., & Latour, B. (1988). Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer. Social Problems, 35, 298–310.
Kalinin, Y., et al. (2010). Responses of Escherichia coli bacteria to two opposing chemoattractant gradients depend on the chemoreceptor ratio. Journal of Bacteriology, 192, 1796–1800.
Kounitsky, P., et al. (2015). Bats adjust their mouth gape to zoom their biosonar field of view. PNAS, 112, 6724–6729.
Leff, G. (2009). Bradwardine and the Pelagians. Cambridge.
Lukes, S. (2004). “Invasions of the Market.” Pp. 57–78 in From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition. Central European University Press.
Marshall, D., & Folsom, M. (1991). Mate Choice in Plants. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 22, 37–63.
Mele, A. (1997). Passive Action. Pp. 135–143 in Contemporary Action Theory. Springer.
Meunier, H., Leca, J.-B., Deneubourg, J.-L., & Petit, O. (2006). Group movement decisions in capuchin monkeys: the utility of an experimental study and a mathematical model to explore the relationship between individual and collective behaviours. Behaviour, 143, 1511–1527.
Meyer, J. (2010). World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 1–20.
Meyer, J. (2017). Reflections on institutional theories of organizations. Pp. 831–852 in The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism. 2nd edition. Sage.
Meyer, K., Soldaat, L., Auge, H., & Thulke, H.-H. (2014). Adaptive and Selective Seed Abortion Reveals Complex Conditional Decision Making in Plants. The American Naturalist, 183, 376–383.
Meyniel, F., Sergent, C., Rigoux, L., Daunizeau, J., & Pessiglione, M. (2013). Neurocomputational account of how the human brain decides when to have a break. PNAS, 110, 2641–2646.
Milford, M., & Schulz, R. (2014). Principles of goal-directed spatial robot navigation in biomimetic models. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 369, 20130484.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.
Norris, J., Stoner, S., Hessler, D., Zawacki, T., George, W., Morrison, D., & Davis, K. (2009). Cognitive mediation of alcohol’s effects on women’s in-the-moment sexual decision making. Health Psychology, 28, 20–28.
Oliveira, F., et al. (2010). Transcranial magnetic simulation of posterior parietal cortex affects decisions of hand choice. PNAS, 107, 17751–17756.
Palacios-Huerta, I. (2014). Beautiful Game Theory. Princeton.
Pearson, J., Watson, K., & Platt, M. (2014). Decision Making: The Neuroethological Turn. Neuron, 82, 950–965.
Peirce, C.S. [1903]1998. The Ethics of Terminology. Pp. 263–266 in The Essential Peirce. Indiana.
Pleasants, N. (2006). The Question of the Holocaust’s Uniqueness. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 33, 297–310.
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge.
Rosenblat, A. (2018). Uberland. California.
Rosenfeld, S. (2014). Free to Choose? The Nation, June 3.
Rosenfeld, S. (2018). Of Revolutions and the problem of choice. Pp. 236–272 in Rethinking the Age of Revolutions. Oxford.
Schüll, N. (2016). Data for life. BioSocieties, 11, 317–333.
Schwartz, O. (2018). Cultures of choice. British Journal of Sociology, 69, 845–864.
Scott-Sheldon, L., et al. (2016). Alcohol Use Predicts Sexual Decision-Making. AIDS and Behavior, 20, S19–S39.
Shadlen, M., & Kiani, R. (2011). Consciousness as a decision to engage. In S. Dehaene, Y. Christen (Eds.), Characterizing consciousness: from cognition to the clinic? Research and perspectives in neurosciences (pp. 27–46). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Slingerland, E. (2003). Effortless Action. Oxford.
Sterzer, P. (2016). Moving forward in perceptual decision making. PNAS, 113, 5771–5773.
Sylwanowicz, M. (1996). Contingent Causality and the Foundations of Duns Scotus’ Metaphysics. Brill.
Tatler, B., Brockmole, J., & Carpenter, R. (2017). LATEST: A model of saccadic decisions in space and time. Psychological Review, 124, 267–300.
Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Topalli, V. (2011). Offender Decision-Making and Motivation. Oxford Bibliographies Online.
Topham, A., et al. (2017). Temperature variability is integrated by a spatially embedded decision-making center to break dormancy in Arabidopsis seeds. PNAS, 114, 6629–6634.
Trommerhäuser, J., Landy, M., & Maloney, L. (2006). Humans Rapidly Estimate Expected Gain in Movement Planning. Psychological Science, 17, 981–988.
Vaisey, S., & Valentino, L. (2018). Culture and Choice. Poetics, 68, 131–143.
Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends. Theory and Society, 31, 325–363.
Williams, B. (1981). Moral Luck. Cambridge.
Wolpert, D., & Landy, M. (2012). Motor control is decision-making. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 22, 996–1003.
Wright, G., & Schiestl, F. (2009). The evolution of floral scent: the influence of olfactory learning by insect pollinators on the honest signaling of floral rewards. Functional Ecology, 23, 841–851.
Yarrow, K., Brown, P., & Krakauer, J. (2009). Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 585–596.
Zhu, J. (2004). Passive Action and Causalism. Philosophical Studies, 119, 295–314.
Acknowledgments
Being thankfully free to choose, I am thankfully free to choose whom to thank and whom not to thank for their help with this article. I would like to choose to thank the Theory and Society editors, reviewers, and managing editor Karen Lucas. Thanks also to Avner Baz, Michael Brownstein, Carrie Figdor, Nicholas Mark, Nigel Pleasants, Michael Sauders, Patrick Schenk, Stephen Turner, and graduate students in my theory seminar at New York University. People who did not help me with this article and therefore I choose not to thank are too many to list here. I wish I could say, paraphrasing Jon Elster, that any defect or fault in this article is intentional and part of the design. They are not.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Abend, G. The limits of decision and choice. Theor Soc 47, 805–841 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09333-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09333-1