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The development of decision-making
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SUPPLEMENT ARTICLE
The Development of Decision-making JAMES P. BYRNES, Ph.D.
Purpose: To describe what is currently known and not known about the development of decision-making skills during adolescence Methods: The author provides a definition of competent decision-making, gives a brief overview of the literature on the development of this competence, and describes the kinds of studies that should be conducted in the near future. Results and Conclusions: Although the literature is still too sparse to be conclusive at present, the literature as a whole suggests that adolescents may have less decisionmaking competence than adults in certain areas (i.e., advice-seeking, evaluation processes, adaptive goal-setting, and learning) but may have similar levels of competence in other areas (i.e., knowledge of options in familiar areas, response to certain moderating factors, and making choices in a number of areas). Moreover, age differences in deliberative aspects of competence have not yet been linked to age differences in the tendency to pursue good options, although one recent study did find a possible link between a post-decisional process (i.e., learning from decisions) and age differences in the selection of good options. Additional studies are needed to firm up the tentative conclusions that can be drawn from the extant research and determine which kinds of interventions improve decision-making in adolescents and which do not. © Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2002
KEY WORDS:
Adolescents Adults Decision-making skills
From the Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Address correspondence to: James P. Byrnes, Ph.D., Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: [email protected]. Manuscript accepted August 22, 2002. 1054-139X/02/$–see front matter PII S1054-139X(02)00503-7
In a typical day, most people make a large number of decisions (e.g., when to get up, what to wear, what tasks to perform at school or work). Although these decisions differ in terms of their content and importance, they nevertheless share a common structure. In particular, in each case, an individual scans an array of options and tries to decide which option is the best way to produce some desired outcome. The key to being successful in life is knowing the difference between options that are likely to produce favorable outcomes and options that are unlikely to produce favorable outcomes. Inasmuch as this discrimination ability is central to the notion of competent decision-making, it follows that there should be a close correspondence between competent decisionmaking and personal success [1]. Similarly, it would be expected that individuals who have a low level of decision-making skill would tend to experience failure and other negative consequences (e.g., serious injuries) on a regular basis. For obvious reasons, therefore, researchers and policymakers have been very interested in the decision-making skills of children, adolescents, and adults [2]. Although parents can compensate for their children’s decision-making inadequacies when they are young (by monitoring them and making important decisions for them), at some point children have to be able to make important decisions on their own. The need for self-regulated decision-making is especially important in the adolescent years when children spend a considerable amount of time in unsupervised contexts with their peers. As such, the topic of adolescent decision-making has a special significance for researchers and policymakers who share an interest in the development of decisionmaking skills. In this paper, what is known about the development of decision-making and what still needs to be known will be summarized. The summary is orga-
© Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc., 360 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010
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nized as follows: (a) a brief elaboration on the definition of competent decision-making to provide an interpretive context for later arguments; (b) a brief overview of the developmental literature on decision-making; and (c) conclusions and description of the kinds of studies that should be conducted in the near future.
Expanding the Notion of Competent Decisionmaking For expository purposes, it is helpful to think of decision-making as consisting of a series of four steps. The first step involves setting a goal (e.g., have fun with friends). The second step involves compiling options for producing that goal (e.g., play sports, go for a joy ride, drink alcohol). The third step involves rank-ordering options (e.g., playing sports is better than going for a joy ride). The last step consists of selecting the highest ranked alternative. In everyday situations, of course, decision-making is generally more dynamic and recursive than step-like. Earlier it was suggested that one aspect of competent decision-making is the ability to discriminate between good options and not-so-good options. Other aspects of competent decision-making follow from the above-mentioned four-step account. With respect to goal-setting (Step 1), for example, competent decision-makers set adaptive goals for themselves and also figure out ways to accommodate several competing goals at once [1,3]. For example, the strategy of sipping the same drink for hours could help a teenager maintain her standing in a peer group while at the same time help her to meet another goal of not getting drunk. When compiling and evaluating options (Steps 2 and 3), competent decision-makers use strategies to overcome obstacles that might hinder the discovery process. For example, they might seek advice from knowledgeable people when they are not sure how to proceed (Step 2) or thoroughly analyze the pros and cons of each of their options (Step 3). Collectively, these three additional aspects of competent decision-making show that there is an optimal approach to decision-making that involves multidimensional thinking and the utilization of effective strategies. This optimal approach can help competent decision-makers attain their goals even when they lack knowledge of good options or have difficulty recognizing the wisdom of known options. One further point to make is that there is a difference between having knowledge of good op-
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tions and actually carrying out these options in particular situations (Step 4). Similarly, there is a difference between having knowledge of effective decision-making approaches (e.g., advice-seeking) and actually utilizing these approaches to discover the best option. Elsewhere [1] it has been argued that there are so-called moderating variables that limit the extent to which such knowledge gets actualized. Several examples of these variables include the personality traits of impulsivity and emotionality. Impulsivity tends to disrupt the discovery process by prompting an individual to jump to the first option that comes to mind or select an option before all the pros and cons of options have been considered. Emotionality, in contrast, tends to disrupt the discovery process by causing a narrowing of attention to one goal to the exclusion of all others or by temporarily elevating a goal to a level of importance or urgency that it normally does not have when the person is calm. In the absence of counteractive measures (e.g., self-calming strategies), these tendencies would make it hard for impulsive or emotional individuals to discover the best available options. When counteractive measures are implemented, however, impulsive or emotional individuals should perform similarly to their less impulsive or less emotional peers. The last aspect of competence pertains to the point made earlier that some decisions are more important than others (e.g., deciding what to wear vs. deciding whom to marry). In several recent accounts, it has been argued that a competent decision-maker is someone who uses effortful approaches (e.g., adviceseeking, thorough evaluation of options) only for important decisions [4]. The tendency to use effortful approaches for all decisions (even trivial ones) is said to be less adaptive and inefficient, as is the tendency to use low-effort shortcuts for all decisions (including important ones).
What Is Currently Known and Not Known About the Development of Decision-making The foregoing analysis of competence provides a useful framework for organizing the available evidence regarding the development of decision-making skills. A decision-maker’s main task in any given context is to discover the best (or at least a very good) way to attain some desirable outcome. Knowledgeable or experienced individuals usually know the best way to proceed, so knowledge would obviously be an important factor that could potentially differ-
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entiate between competent and less competent decision-makers. When knowledge is lacking and good options could not be retrieved from memory, however, a decision-maker could still discover good alternatives if he or she has access to someone else who has the requisite knowledge and seeks advice from this more knowledgeable individual. After a set of options has been compiled from memory or through advice-seeking, competence would further be demonstrated by the tendency to weigh multiple pros and cons of all options (but only when decisions are important). Two other aspects of competence include the tendency to coordinate multiple adaptive goals and use counteractive measures to ameliorate the effects of troublesome dispositional traits. If all goes well during Steps 1 through 3, the person chooses the best option. Cast in the form of developmental research questions, this analysis suggests that it would be important for researchers to find answers to the following: (a) Are adults more knowledgeable and experienced than children and adolescents? If so, does this difference translate into an age difference in good choices? (b) When knowledge is lacking, are adults more likely than children or adolescents to have access to knowledgeable individuals? If so, are they more likely to seek advice from these individuals? (c) When a set of options for an important decision has been compiled, are adults more likely than children or adolescents to weigh multiple pros and cons of these options? If so, does this difference translate into an age difference in good choices? (d) When an unimportant decision arises, are adults more likely than children or adolescents to show a decrease in the use of effortful compilation and evaluation strategies? (e) Are adults more likely than children and adolescents to set adaptive goals for themselves and figure out ways to satisfy multiple competing goals at once? If so, does this difference translate into an age difference in good choices? (f) Are adults less vulnerable to the effects of moderating factors than children and adolescents? If so, is this difference owing to the fact that the strength of these factors diminish with age or to the fact that adults are more likely to use strategies to overcome the influence of these factors? In either case, do the changes related to moderating
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factors translate into a developmental difference in good choices? In what follows, I consider the extent to which researchers have provided answers to questions (a) to (f).
Knowledge and Experience In general, adults tend to have more knowledge and experience in particular areas than adolescents or children. However, to my knowledge, this advantage has not been shown to systematically translate into an age difference in good selections [1,5]. The latter would not be a foregone conclusion because, as noted earlier, having knowledge is not the same as using it to pursue adaptive goals. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that shows that knowledge is sometimes unrelated to the tendency to engage in risky behaviors related to alcohol, sex, smoking, and illicit drugs [6,7]. That is, adolescents who have been told of the dangers of these behaviors (or who already know them) are not necessarily less likely to engage in the behaviors than adolescents who were not so instructed (or less knowledgeable). Further, contemporary views of cognition stress the domain specificity of knowledge and skill [8]. These views imply that adults would occasionally make poor decisions in areas outside their existing knowledge base and that adolescents can sometimes make better decisions than adults when adolescents have more knowledge about a particular topic than adults, as Byrnes and Torney-Purta [9] showed. Finally, it should also be noted that experienced individuals are not necessarily experts. Some studies have shown that experienced individuals have more total items of topic-relevant information in memory than inexperienced individuals, but most of this additional information is inaccurate [1]. In the main, however, adults would be expected to often make better decisions than adolescents and children simply because the former have had more education and life experience than the latter [10]. In addition, there is an important, but relatively ignored, aspect of knowledge that might prove to produce consistent age differences in choices: selfknowledge. Sometimes people misjudge how terrific or awful some experience would be when it is their first time to engage in the experience. When the experience is over, they realize that they made a mistake (i.e., it was not as great or awful as they thought it would be). When they learn more about themselves (i.e., how they tend to feel in certain
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situations), they are less likely to make mistakes of naivete´ again. Because children and adolescents are often first-timers, they would tend to pursue certain options more often than adults and then regret this decision later. Another source of regret would derive from the fact that a person’s values often change over time [11,12]. Most adults can identify issues that they once thought were important but seem trivial or even comical in retrospect (e.g., having our peers think that we were “cool”). Sometimes, a change in an individual’s values and priorities will do far more to change a misguided pattern of choices than a change in his or her knowledge.
Advice-seeking The literature on advice-seeking in children and adults is relatively sparse [1,13]. Nevertheless, enough evidence has accrued to suggest that children are less inclined to seek help from knowledgeable adults as they progress through the adolescent period. When given a choice between an unfamiliar expert and a familiar nonexpert (e.g., a friend), for example, they often choose the latter. However, there is evidence that adults also engage in faulty adviceseeking. For example, many adults have been found to place too much trust in the advice given by colleagues or financial advisers [14]. Moreover, studies of presidential decision-making has shown how poor advice has often led to a variety of fiascos (e.g., the Bay of Pigs). In a fast-moving and rapidly changing environment, these findings on advice-seeking are somewhat troubling. It is impossible to be an expert in everything, so it is important for children to develop the kinds of advice-seeking approaches that can maximize their chances of securing accurate information as needed. Unfortunately, schools do little to promote advice-seeking skills. If anything, they tend to actively discourage children from seeking help and advice [13].
Evaluation Processes Studies show that adults are likely to alternate between effortful and less effortful evaluation strategies depending of the importance of a decision [15]. Studies with children and preadolescents show comparable tendencies, especially when children are older than age 8 years [4,16,17]. The primary difference between adults and children seems to be that the behavior of adults is somewhat more consistent, differentiated, and strategic.
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One further aspect of the evaluation process worth noting is that there is some evidence that the number of issues considered for particular decisions (i.e., what could happen if particular options were implemented) sometimes covaries with age and education. In other words, older or more-educated individuals seem to be aware of a greater number of consequences than younger or less-educated individuals [9,18,19]. However, it is not clear whether these findings reflect an age difference in the tendency to report information [20] or an actual difference in knowledge. Moreover, not all of the additional information reported by older individuals is accurate [9]. Finally, some studies have found no differences in the consequence-reporting of adolescents and adults [21].
Adaptive Goal-setting Researchers who study goals have generally been more interested in individual differences than in developmental differences [1,3]. Within-age comparisons have shown that successful children (e.g., those with high grade point averages) are more likely to coordinate multiple goals than their less successful peers (e.g., get good grades and also maintaining popularity with peers). A similar conclusion has been drawn from studies that have compared successful and less successful business leaders and government officials [14]. Whereas the former strive to satisfy multiple goals, the latter often lapse into unidimensional (i.e., one-goal) thinking. Although the topic of goals has not been prominent in the developmental literature on decisionmaking, several recent studies have shown that adults are more likely than 13-year-olds to coordinate multiple goals in their choices [22,23]. For example, Byrnes et al. [23] asked 13-year-olds and adults to pretend that they were doctors who were prescribing drugs to a series of fictional patients. The main task involved deciding which of three drugs to prescribe. Whereas there were no age differences in the extent to which the target problem (e.g., high blood pressure) was lessened by the drug choices of 13-year-olds and adults, the “patients” of the 13year-olds experienced significantly more debilitating side effects than the “patients” of the adults. Thus, 13-year-olds were less able to coordinate the goal of lowering blood pressure with the goal of minimizing side effects.
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Moderating Factors As suggested earlier, a moderating factor is any factor that keeps an individual from making full use of his or her resources (intellectual or otherwise) or serves to distract a decision-maker from really important goals [1]. It was earlier noted that moderating factors would tend to exert different effects on decision-making at different ages if one of the following were true: (a) their strength lessened or increased over time (e.g., people generally became less emotional with age), or (b) their strength remained the same but people were more likely to use counteractive measures with age (e.g., self-calming strategies to ameliorate emotionality). If either of these conditions were true, one would expect that younger decision-makers would tend to discover good options less often than older decision-makers. Byrnes [1] reviewed the developmental literature on a variety of moderating factors including working memory limitations, processing biases, stress, psychoactive substances, and personality traits. In the case of working memory (i.e., the fixed-capacity component of memory in which information is temporarily held), it is generally believed that the absolute capacity of this resource does not increase much after age 8 years. Instead, older decision-makers are thought to make greater use of this memory than younger decision-makers because of developmental changes in knowledge, memory strategies, and processing speed [24]. This claim suggests that, for familiar decisions, older decision-makers would be more able to compare the relative virtues of two multidimensional decisions in working memory than younger decision-makers. As such, the former would be more likely to discover the best option in a set of complex options than the latter. When decisions are simple or involve topics that are equally familiar to both age groups, however, older decisionmakers would not necessarily be more likely to discover the best option. An additional point to make is that working memory limitations become considerably less important when all of the information about options can be written down. Processing biases include heuristics (i.e., cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb) and encoding strategies that are used to cope with complex decisions [25]. Their use is a problem only when the real rate of occurrence of some phenomenon (e.g., the level of crime in a minority neighborhood) differs from what the heuristics suggest and important dimensions of decisions are disregarded as the decision-maker trims down the issues to a less perplexing number
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(e.g., disregarding the repair record of cars to focus on just cost and seating capacity). Most studies show that older children and adolescents are similar to adults in their tendency to use processing biases for complex decisions [26 –30]. As such, these biases would probably not be the main cause of an age differences in good choices unless it were found that older individuals tend to use strategies to overcome these biases more often than younger individuals. To my knowledge, researchers have not investigated the latter (unlikely) possibility. As for stress, it affects decision-making by causing a narrowing of attention and a haphazard scanning of alternatives [31]. Analogous to what was said for working memory, then, stress tends to decrease one’s chances of discovering the best option in a complex situation. Stress also produces fear (i.e., the decisionmaker is afraid that he or she will not be able to accomplish everything that has to be accomplished in a particular time frame), and this emotional response could temporarily heighten the importance of the small set of goals that have temporarily captured the decision-maker’s attention [1]. But fear would be evoked only if a decision-maker were concerned about the loss of something important [32]. People do not feel stressed when they have to accomplish a number of unimportant things (e.g., the decisionmaker might say, “Who cares if some of these things do not get accomplished?”). How might the effects of stress relate to developmental trends in competent decision-making? The answer to this question depends on whether there is reason to expect developmental increases or decreases in the frequency with which children experience stress and the use of coping strategies to deal with stress. If stressful contexts increase in frequency with age but coping strategies do not, there should be a developmental increase in the proportion of suboptimal choices that children make in a given time period. If stressful situations and coping strategies increase simultaneously, however, then the proportion of suboptimal choices would remain relatively constant with age. If stressful situations increase but there is a developmental lag in the acquisition of coping strategies, a U-shaped pattern of performance would be expected (e.g., a drop in performance in early adolescence followed by an increase as adolescents approach adulthood). The developmental literature on stress suggests that children are more likely to use appropriate coping strategies with age, but, to my knowledge, this finding has not been linked to an assessment of whether older children experience stress more often
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and whether older children make a greater proportion of poor decisions as a result [1]. One further complicating factor is the presence of adults who can help children manage their stress and see the wisdom of particular options. For those children who lack such social supports, development could indeed follow a U-shaped trend. For those children who have such supports, however, such a trend would not necessarily be expected. Similar to stress, psychoactive substances (i.e., alcohol and illicit drugs) disrupt decision-making by causing a narrowing of attention [33]. Other problems arise from the fact that these substances also decrease the likelihood that someone would consider the negative consequences of their actions and promote a lack of physical coordination and loss in reaction time. The proportion of suboptimal choices would be expected to show an increase with age if there was reason to expect that older children spend more time than younger children in contexts in which psychoactive substances are readily available. Other than waiting until these drugs leave one’s system, there are no counteractive measures that an adolescent could use to ameliorate the disruptions in decision-making caused by psychoactive substances. Studies do in fact show an increase with age in the use of psychoactive substances and in the negative outcomes caused by these substances [6,34]. Personality traits are the last type of moderator mentioned by Byrnes [1]. Of interest are those traits that would be expected to either disrupt the discovery process (e.g., promote a fast, incomplete scanning of alternatives) or serve to side-track the decisionmaker away from the pursuit of top-priority goals. How impulsivity and emotionality can act in such ways has already been described . Two other moderating traits include inhibition (or shyness) and sensation-seeking [1]. The developmental literature on personality suggests that the expression of these traits changes with age, but these changes occur at different points in development for different traits [1,35]. For researchers interested in the particular contrast between child and adolescent decision-making, the trait of sensation-seeking would be relevant because this trait seems to be more prevalent in adolescence than in childhood [36]. For those interested in the contrast between adolescent and adult decision-making, however, the trait of emotionality would be relevant because it shows an apparent decrease between adolescence and adulthood. Thus, the strength of these moderators do change over time, but to my knowledge no one has examined age changes in the use of counteractive measures. If
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counteractive measures are used infrequently at all ages, then developmental changes in these personality traits might directly translate into developmental changes in the proportion of suboptimal choices [37]. Before moving on, it is useful to note that there are other moderating influences besides those reviewed by Byrnes [1]. One particularly salient example is peer influence. Peers can make it either easy or difficult for a young decision-maker to pursue goals. When peers have similar goals, a decision-maker is not faced with the challenge of how to maintain positive peer relations while pursuing peer-incompatible goals. Moreover, a decision-maker would not tend to be distracted from these goals. When an individual and his/her peers have dissimilar goals, however, adaptive goal coordination is more difficult and peers serve as a form of distraction. Recent studies have shown that peers do, in fact, affect the extent of risk-taking in children and adolescents [34,37–39]. Choices and Learning So far in this paper, the focus has been on the literature that pertains to Steps 1 through 3 in the decision-making process. The utility of focusing on these predecisional processes is that they collectively determine the choices that someone makes in a particular decision. As such, a researcher could appeal to these processes when asked, “Why did he/ she choose that option?” An alternative research strategy would be to ignore these predecisional processes and simply document the frequency with which individuals in various age groups make objectively poor choices (e.g., engage in unprotected sex, use illicit drugs, binge drink, drive while intoxicated, spend excessive amounts on gambling, smoke cigarettes). One particularly troubling finding in the developmental literature is that adolescents are more likely to engage in these behaviors than children [6]. The same literature suggests that a controversy has arisen over the issue of whether this increase is maintained into early adulthood. In my view, this controversy is somewhat beside the point in the sense that it does not bring us any closer to understanding how to reduce the incidence of poor choices in adolescents (or adults for that matter). In contrast, a focus on age differences in predecisional activities would help us gain insight into the reasons for their choices and, consequently, possible ways to intervene. Following a similar logic, it would also be important to consider what happens after a decision has
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been implemented. It has often been said (but rarely shown) that a competent decision-maker is someone who learns from mistakes [1]. Learning is, after all, the mechanism by which we gain the knowledge that helps us recognize good options on our own. Research shows that learning is by no means automatic when people are shown the errors of their ways. Three factors that limit the extent to which we learn from mistakes (our own and those of our peers) are: (a) the personality trait of dogmatism [40], (b) an inadequate conceptual base [23], and (c) the extent to which we consider ourselves similar to individuals who are likely to make a particular mistake [41]. Byrnes et al. [23] showed in two experiments that adults were more likely to learn from feedback than adolescents. As a result, age differences in the selection of good choices increased over time. Of the three impediments to learning, conceptual misunderstandings may have been the most important developmental factor in that study (i.e., younger children may not have understood the meaning of feedback).
Summary What can be said about the development of decisionmaking skills? This brief review suggests that questions (a) through (f) have not been given enough attention to warrant firm conclusions at this point. Decision-making competence is multifaceted, domain specific, and context specific. Age differences (favoring adults) have been found for certain aspects of this competence (i.e., advice-seeking, evaluation processes, adaptive goal-setting, and learning), but consistent differences have not yet been found for other aspects (i.e., knowledge of options, certain moderating factors, and avoiding certain unwise alternatives). Moreover, age differences in predecisional aspects of competence have not yet been linked to age differences in the tendency to pursue good options, although one recent study did find a possible link between a postdecisional process (i.e., learning) and age differences in the selection of good options. On the whole, however, the evidence is slowly beginning to suggest that there may be nontrivial differences in the decision-making skills of children, adolescents, and adults that may require some form of targeted intervention.
Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Research In my view, there are three important lines of research that need to be conducted. The first should
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attempt to provide more complete answers to questions a through f above. The general approach would involve: (a) finding representative samples of children, adolescents, and adults; (b) investigating the extent to which individuals in each age group demonstrate predecisional and postdecisional aspects of competence in appropriate contexts (e.g., adviceseeking when uncertain); (c) utilizing diverse measurement techniques (i.e., experimental tasks, questionnaires, and interviews) to assess the expression of these aspects across multiple topic areas (e.g., consumer choices, health-related choices, social choices); and (d) linking performance on each aspect of competence to the frequency with which individuals in each age group discover the best option in a particular circumstance. Ultimately, this first line of research will identify the aspects of decision-making competence that truly seem to improve between childhood and adulthood. Simultaneously, this line will identify the aspects that should be the targets of interventions (i.e., the aspects that do not improve). The second line of research should be experimental investigations of the effectiveness of interventions programs that are based on the findings of the first line of research. There are many ways to target the expected cause of some problem, but only some of these approaches will turn out to be effective. As a possible means of identifying plausible approaches, a third line of research should be initiated that attempts to document the natural history of decisionmaking skills. One technique would be to locate groups of highly successful and less successful children, adolescents, and adults. Then researchers could focus on two questions: (a) How do these groups differ in terms of predecisional and postdecisional processes? and (b) How do they differ in terms of their sociocultural circumstances (e.g., the frequency with which they find themselves in riskproducing contexts; the extent to which their parents foster autonomy, monitor them, and model competent decision-making; characteristics of their peer group)? The third line of research will help us understand who develops decision-making competence and why. Understanding this process will provide further insight into possible ways to improve the decision-making skills of less competent individuals and help them to attain important life goals.
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21. Quadrel MJ, Fischhoff B, Davis W. Adolescent (in)vulnerability. Am Psychol 1993;48:102–16. 22. Byrnes JP, McClenny B. Decision-making in young adolescents and adults. J Exp Child Psychol 1994;58:359 –88. 23. Byrnes JP, Miller DC, Reynolds M. Learning to make good decisions: A self-regulation perspective. Child Dev 1999;70: 1121–40. 24. Bjorklund DF. Children’s Thinking: Developmental Function and Individual Differences, 3rd Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, 2000. 25. Kahneman D, Slovic P, Tversky A. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 26. Baron J, Granato L, Spranca M, et al. Decision-making biases in children and early adolescents: Exploratory studies. Merrill Palmer Q 1993;39:22–46. 27. Davidson D. The representativeness heuristic and the conjunction fallacy effect in children’s decision-making. Merrill Palmer Q 1995;41:328 –46. 28. Klaczynski PA. Bias in adolescents’ everyday reasoning and its relationship with intellectual ability, personal theories, and self-serving motivation. Dev Psychol 1997;33:273–83. 29. Jacobs JE, Potenza M. The use of judgment heuristics to make social and object decisions: A developmental perspective. Child Dev 1991;62:166 –78. 30. Reyna VF, Ellis SC. Fuzzy-trace theory and framing effects in children’s risky decision-making. Psychol Sci 1994;5:275–79. 31. Keinan G. Decision-making under stress: Scanning of alternatives under controllable and uncontrollable threats. J Pers Soc Psychol 1987;52:639 –44. 32. Frijda N. Emotions are functional, most of the time. In: Davidson RJ, Ekman P (eds). The Nature of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994:112–22. 33. Steele CM, Josephs RA. Alcohol myopia: Its prized and dangerous effects. Am Psychol 1990;45:921–33. 34. Millstein SG, Moscicki A. Sexually-transmitted disease in female adolescents: Effects of psychosocial factors and high risk behaviors. J Adolesc Health 1995;17:83–90. 35. Caspi A. Personality development across the life course. In: Damon W, Eisenberg N (eds). Handbook of Child Psychology, 5th Edition. New York: Wiley, 1998:312–71. 36. Arnett J. Reckless behavior in adolescence: A developmental perspective. Dev Rev 1992;12:339 –73. 37. Miller DC, Byrnes JP. The role of personal and contextual factors in children’s risk-taking. Dev Psychol 1997;33:814 –23. 38. Jessor R, Van den Bos J, Vanderryn J, et al. Protective factors in adolescent problem behavior: Moderator effects and developmental change. Dev Psychol 1995;31:923–33. 39. Urberg KA, Degirmencioglu SM, Pilgrim C. Close friend and group influence on adolescent cigarette smoking and alcohol use. Dev Psychol 1997;33:834 –44. 40. Davies MF. Dogmatism and the persistence of discredited beliefs. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 1993;19:692–99. 41. Gibbons FX, Gerard M. Predicting young adults’ health risk behavior. J Pers Soc Psychol 1995;69:505–17.
SUPPLEMENT ARTICLE
The Development of Decision-making JAMES P. BYRNES, Ph.D.
Purpose: To describe what is currently known and not known about the development of decision-making skills during adolescence Methods: The author provides a definition of competent decision-making, gives a brief overview of the literature on the development of this competence, and describes the kinds of studies that should be conducted in the near future. Results and Conclusions: Although the literature is still too sparse to be conclusive at present, the literature as a whole suggests that adolescents may have less decisionmaking competence than adults in certain areas (i.e., advice-seeking, evaluation processes, adaptive goal-setting, and learning) but may have similar levels of competence in other areas (i.e., knowledge of options in familiar areas, response to certain moderating factors, and making choices in a number of areas). Moreover, age differences in deliberative aspects of competence have not yet been linked to age differences in the tendency to pursue good options, although one recent study did find a possible link between a post-decisional process (i.e., learning from decisions) and age differences in the selection of good options. Additional studies are needed to firm up the tentative conclusions that can be drawn from the extant research and determine which kinds of interventions improve decision-making in adolescents and which do not. © Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2002
KEY WORDS:
Adolescents Adults Decision-making skills
From the Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. Address correspondence to: James P. Byrnes, Ph.D., Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: [email protected]. Manuscript accepted August 22, 2002. 1054-139X/02/$–see front matter PII S1054-139X(02)00503-7
In a typical day, most people make a large number of decisions (e.g., when to get up, what to wear, what tasks to perform at school or work). Although these decisions differ in terms of their content and importance, they nevertheless share a common structure. In particular, in each case, an individual scans an array of options and tries to decide which option is the best way to produce some desired outcome. The key to being successful in life is knowing the difference between options that are likely to produce favorable outcomes and options that are unlikely to produce favorable outcomes. Inasmuch as this discrimination ability is central to the notion of competent decision-making, it follows that there should be a close correspondence between competent decisionmaking and personal success [1]. Similarly, it would be expected that individuals who have a low level of decision-making skill would tend to experience failure and other negative consequences (e.g., serious injuries) on a regular basis. For obvious reasons, therefore, researchers and policymakers have been very interested in the decision-making skills of children, adolescents, and adults [2]. Although parents can compensate for their children’s decision-making inadequacies when they are young (by monitoring them and making important decisions for them), at some point children have to be able to make important decisions on their own. The need for self-regulated decision-making is especially important in the adolescent years when children spend a considerable amount of time in unsupervised contexts with their peers. As such, the topic of adolescent decision-making has a special significance for researchers and policymakers who share an interest in the development of decisionmaking skills. In this paper, what is known about the development of decision-making and what still needs to be known will be summarized. The summary is orga-
© Society for Adolescent Medicine, 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc., 360 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010
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nized as follows: (a) a brief elaboration on the definition of competent decision-making to provide an interpretive context for later arguments; (b) a brief overview of the developmental literature on decision-making; and (c) conclusions and description of the kinds of studies that should be conducted in the near future.
Expanding the Notion of Competent Decisionmaking For expository purposes, it is helpful to think of decision-making as consisting of a series of four steps. The first step involves setting a goal (e.g., have fun with friends). The second step involves compiling options for producing that goal (e.g., play sports, go for a joy ride, drink alcohol). The third step involves rank-ordering options (e.g., playing sports is better than going for a joy ride). The last step consists of selecting the highest ranked alternative. In everyday situations, of course, decision-making is generally more dynamic and recursive than step-like. Earlier it was suggested that one aspect of competent decision-making is the ability to discriminate between good options and not-so-good options. Other aspects of competent decision-making follow from the above-mentioned four-step account. With respect to goal-setting (Step 1), for example, competent decision-makers set adaptive goals for themselves and also figure out ways to accommodate several competing goals at once [1,3]. For example, the strategy of sipping the same drink for hours could help a teenager maintain her standing in a peer group while at the same time help her to meet another goal of not getting drunk. When compiling and evaluating options (Steps 2 and 3), competent decision-makers use strategies to overcome obstacles that might hinder the discovery process. For example, they might seek advice from knowledgeable people when they are not sure how to proceed (Step 2) or thoroughly analyze the pros and cons of each of their options (Step 3). Collectively, these three additional aspects of competent decision-making show that there is an optimal approach to decision-making that involves multidimensional thinking and the utilization of effective strategies. This optimal approach can help competent decision-makers attain their goals even when they lack knowledge of good options or have difficulty recognizing the wisdom of known options. One further point to make is that there is a difference between having knowledge of good op-
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tions and actually carrying out these options in particular situations (Step 4). Similarly, there is a difference between having knowledge of effective decision-making approaches (e.g., advice-seeking) and actually utilizing these approaches to discover the best option. Elsewhere [1] it has been argued that there are so-called moderating variables that limit the extent to which such knowledge gets actualized. Several examples of these variables include the personality traits of impulsivity and emotionality. Impulsivity tends to disrupt the discovery process by prompting an individual to jump to the first option that comes to mind or select an option before all the pros and cons of options have been considered. Emotionality, in contrast, tends to disrupt the discovery process by causing a narrowing of attention to one goal to the exclusion of all others or by temporarily elevating a goal to a level of importance or urgency that it normally does not have when the person is calm. In the absence of counteractive measures (e.g., self-calming strategies), these tendencies would make it hard for impulsive or emotional individuals to discover the best available options. When counteractive measures are implemented, however, impulsive or emotional individuals should perform similarly to their less impulsive or less emotional peers. The last aspect of competence pertains to the point made earlier that some decisions are more important than others (e.g., deciding what to wear vs. deciding whom to marry). In several recent accounts, it has been argued that a competent decision-maker is someone who uses effortful approaches (e.g., adviceseeking, thorough evaluation of options) only for important decisions [4]. The tendency to use effortful approaches for all decisions (even trivial ones) is said to be less adaptive and inefficient, as is the tendency to use low-effort shortcuts for all decisions (including important ones).
What Is Currently Known and Not Known About the Development of Decision-making The foregoing analysis of competence provides a useful framework for organizing the available evidence regarding the development of decision-making skills. A decision-maker’s main task in any given context is to discover the best (or at least a very good) way to attain some desirable outcome. Knowledgeable or experienced individuals usually know the best way to proceed, so knowledge would obviously be an important factor that could potentially differ-
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entiate between competent and less competent decision-makers. When knowledge is lacking and good options could not be retrieved from memory, however, a decision-maker could still discover good alternatives if he or she has access to someone else who has the requisite knowledge and seeks advice from this more knowledgeable individual. After a set of options has been compiled from memory or through advice-seeking, competence would further be demonstrated by the tendency to weigh multiple pros and cons of all options (but only when decisions are important). Two other aspects of competence include the tendency to coordinate multiple adaptive goals and use counteractive measures to ameliorate the effects of troublesome dispositional traits. If all goes well during Steps 1 through 3, the person chooses the best option. Cast in the form of developmental research questions, this analysis suggests that it would be important for researchers to find answers to the following: (a) Are adults more knowledgeable and experienced than children and adolescents? If so, does this difference translate into an age difference in good choices? (b) When knowledge is lacking, are adults more likely than children or adolescents to have access to knowledgeable individuals? If so, are they more likely to seek advice from these individuals? (c) When a set of options for an important decision has been compiled, are adults more likely than children or adolescents to weigh multiple pros and cons of these options? If so, does this difference translate into an age difference in good choices? (d) When an unimportant decision arises, are adults more likely than children or adolescents to show a decrease in the use of effortful compilation and evaluation strategies? (e) Are adults more likely than children and adolescents to set adaptive goals for themselves and figure out ways to satisfy multiple competing goals at once? If so, does this difference translate into an age difference in good choices? (f) Are adults less vulnerable to the effects of moderating factors than children and adolescents? If so, is this difference owing to the fact that the strength of these factors diminish with age or to the fact that adults are more likely to use strategies to overcome the influence of these factors? In either case, do the changes related to moderating
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factors translate into a developmental difference in good choices? In what follows, I consider the extent to which researchers have provided answers to questions (a) to (f).
Knowledge and Experience In general, adults tend to have more knowledge and experience in particular areas than adolescents or children. However, to my knowledge, this advantage has not been shown to systematically translate into an age difference in good selections [1,5]. The latter would not be a foregone conclusion because, as noted earlier, having knowledge is not the same as using it to pursue adaptive goals. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that shows that knowledge is sometimes unrelated to the tendency to engage in risky behaviors related to alcohol, sex, smoking, and illicit drugs [6,7]. That is, adolescents who have been told of the dangers of these behaviors (or who already know them) are not necessarily less likely to engage in the behaviors than adolescents who were not so instructed (or less knowledgeable). Further, contemporary views of cognition stress the domain specificity of knowledge and skill [8]. These views imply that adults would occasionally make poor decisions in areas outside their existing knowledge base and that adolescents can sometimes make better decisions than adults when adolescents have more knowledge about a particular topic than adults, as Byrnes and Torney-Purta [9] showed. Finally, it should also be noted that experienced individuals are not necessarily experts. Some studies have shown that experienced individuals have more total items of topic-relevant information in memory than inexperienced individuals, but most of this additional information is inaccurate [1]. In the main, however, adults would be expected to often make better decisions than adolescents and children simply because the former have had more education and life experience than the latter [10]. In addition, there is an important, but relatively ignored, aspect of knowledge that might prove to produce consistent age differences in choices: selfknowledge. Sometimes people misjudge how terrific or awful some experience would be when it is their first time to engage in the experience. When the experience is over, they realize that they made a mistake (i.e., it was not as great or awful as they thought it would be). When they learn more about themselves (i.e., how they tend to feel in certain
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situations), they are less likely to make mistakes of naivete´ again. Because children and adolescents are often first-timers, they would tend to pursue certain options more often than adults and then regret this decision later. Another source of regret would derive from the fact that a person’s values often change over time [11,12]. Most adults can identify issues that they once thought were important but seem trivial or even comical in retrospect (e.g., having our peers think that we were “cool”). Sometimes, a change in an individual’s values and priorities will do far more to change a misguided pattern of choices than a change in his or her knowledge.
Advice-seeking The literature on advice-seeking in children and adults is relatively sparse [1,13]. Nevertheless, enough evidence has accrued to suggest that children are less inclined to seek help from knowledgeable adults as they progress through the adolescent period. When given a choice between an unfamiliar expert and a familiar nonexpert (e.g., a friend), for example, they often choose the latter. However, there is evidence that adults also engage in faulty adviceseeking. For example, many adults have been found to place too much trust in the advice given by colleagues or financial advisers [14]. Moreover, studies of presidential decision-making has shown how poor advice has often led to a variety of fiascos (e.g., the Bay of Pigs). In a fast-moving and rapidly changing environment, these findings on advice-seeking are somewhat troubling. It is impossible to be an expert in everything, so it is important for children to develop the kinds of advice-seeking approaches that can maximize their chances of securing accurate information as needed. Unfortunately, schools do little to promote advice-seeking skills. If anything, they tend to actively discourage children from seeking help and advice [13].
Evaluation Processes Studies show that adults are likely to alternate between effortful and less effortful evaluation strategies depending of the importance of a decision [15]. Studies with children and preadolescents show comparable tendencies, especially when children are older than age 8 years [4,16,17]. The primary difference between adults and children seems to be that the behavior of adults is somewhat more consistent, differentiated, and strategic.
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One further aspect of the evaluation process worth noting is that there is some evidence that the number of issues considered for particular decisions (i.e., what could happen if particular options were implemented) sometimes covaries with age and education. In other words, older or more-educated individuals seem to be aware of a greater number of consequences than younger or less-educated individuals [9,18,19]. However, it is not clear whether these findings reflect an age difference in the tendency to report information [20] or an actual difference in knowledge. Moreover, not all of the additional information reported by older individuals is accurate [9]. Finally, some studies have found no differences in the consequence-reporting of adolescents and adults [21].
Adaptive Goal-setting Researchers who study goals have generally been more interested in individual differences than in developmental differences [1,3]. Within-age comparisons have shown that successful children (e.g., those with high grade point averages) are more likely to coordinate multiple goals than their less successful peers (e.g., get good grades and also maintaining popularity with peers). A similar conclusion has been drawn from studies that have compared successful and less successful business leaders and government officials [14]. Whereas the former strive to satisfy multiple goals, the latter often lapse into unidimensional (i.e., one-goal) thinking. Although the topic of goals has not been prominent in the developmental literature on decisionmaking, several recent studies have shown that adults are more likely than 13-year-olds to coordinate multiple goals in their choices [22,23]. For example, Byrnes et al. [23] asked 13-year-olds and adults to pretend that they were doctors who were prescribing drugs to a series of fictional patients. The main task involved deciding which of three drugs to prescribe. Whereas there were no age differences in the extent to which the target problem (e.g., high blood pressure) was lessened by the drug choices of 13-year-olds and adults, the “patients” of the 13year-olds experienced significantly more debilitating side effects than the “patients” of the adults. Thus, 13-year-olds were less able to coordinate the goal of lowering blood pressure with the goal of minimizing side effects.
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Moderating Factors As suggested earlier, a moderating factor is any factor that keeps an individual from making full use of his or her resources (intellectual or otherwise) or serves to distract a decision-maker from really important goals [1]. It was earlier noted that moderating factors would tend to exert different effects on decision-making at different ages if one of the following were true: (a) their strength lessened or increased over time (e.g., people generally became less emotional with age), or (b) their strength remained the same but people were more likely to use counteractive measures with age (e.g., self-calming strategies to ameliorate emotionality). If either of these conditions were true, one would expect that younger decision-makers would tend to discover good options less often than older decision-makers. Byrnes [1] reviewed the developmental literature on a variety of moderating factors including working memory limitations, processing biases, stress, psychoactive substances, and personality traits. In the case of working memory (i.e., the fixed-capacity component of memory in which information is temporarily held), it is generally believed that the absolute capacity of this resource does not increase much after age 8 years. Instead, older decision-makers are thought to make greater use of this memory than younger decision-makers because of developmental changes in knowledge, memory strategies, and processing speed [24]. This claim suggests that, for familiar decisions, older decision-makers would be more able to compare the relative virtues of two multidimensional decisions in working memory than younger decision-makers. As such, the former would be more likely to discover the best option in a set of complex options than the latter. When decisions are simple or involve topics that are equally familiar to both age groups, however, older decisionmakers would not necessarily be more likely to discover the best option. An additional point to make is that working memory limitations become considerably less important when all of the information about options can be written down. Processing biases include heuristics (i.e., cognitive shortcuts or rules of thumb) and encoding strategies that are used to cope with complex decisions [25]. Their use is a problem only when the real rate of occurrence of some phenomenon (e.g., the level of crime in a minority neighborhood) differs from what the heuristics suggest and important dimensions of decisions are disregarded as the decision-maker trims down the issues to a less perplexing number
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(e.g., disregarding the repair record of cars to focus on just cost and seating capacity). Most studies show that older children and adolescents are similar to adults in their tendency to use processing biases for complex decisions [26 –30]. As such, these biases would probably not be the main cause of an age differences in good choices unless it were found that older individuals tend to use strategies to overcome these biases more often than younger individuals. To my knowledge, researchers have not investigated the latter (unlikely) possibility. As for stress, it affects decision-making by causing a narrowing of attention and a haphazard scanning of alternatives [31]. Analogous to what was said for working memory, then, stress tends to decrease one’s chances of discovering the best option in a complex situation. Stress also produces fear (i.e., the decisionmaker is afraid that he or she will not be able to accomplish everything that has to be accomplished in a particular time frame), and this emotional response could temporarily heighten the importance of the small set of goals that have temporarily captured the decision-maker’s attention [1]. But fear would be evoked only if a decision-maker were concerned about the loss of something important [32]. People do not feel stressed when they have to accomplish a number of unimportant things (e.g., the decisionmaker might say, “Who cares if some of these things do not get accomplished?”). How might the effects of stress relate to developmental trends in competent decision-making? The answer to this question depends on whether there is reason to expect developmental increases or decreases in the frequency with which children experience stress and the use of coping strategies to deal with stress. If stressful contexts increase in frequency with age but coping strategies do not, there should be a developmental increase in the proportion of suboptimal choices that children make in a given time period. If stressful situations and coping strategies increase simultaneously, however, then the proportion of suboptimal choices would remain relatively constant with age. If stressful situations increase but there is a developmental lag in the acquisition of coping strategies, a U-shaped pattern of performance would be expected (e.g., a drop in performance in early adolescence followed by an increase as adolescents approach adulthood). The developmental literature on stress suggests that children are more likely to use appropriate coping strategies with age, but, to my knowledge, this finding has not been linked to an assessment of whether older children experience stress more often
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and whether older children make a greater proportion of poor decisions as a result [1]. One further complicating factor is the presence of adults who can help children manage their stress and see the wisdom of particular options. For those children who lack such social supports, development could indeed follow a U-shaped trend. For those children who have such supports, however, such a trend would not necessarily be expected. Similar to stress, psychoactive substances (i.e., alcohol and illicit drugs) disrupt decision-making by causing a narrowing of attention [33]. Other problems arise from the fact that these substances also decrease the likelihood that someone would consider the negative consequences of their actions and promote a lack of physical coordination and loss in reaction time. The proportion of suboptimal choices would be expected to show an increase with age if there was reason to expect that older children spend more time than younger children in contexts in which psychoactive substances are readily available. Other than waiting until these drugs leave one’s system, there are no counteractive measures that an adolescent could use to ameliorate the disruptions in decision-making caused by psychoactive substances. Studies do in fact show an increase with age in the use of psychoactive substances and in the negative outcomes caused by these substances [6,34]. Personality traits are the last type of moderator mentioned by Byrnes [1]. Of interest are those traits that would be expected to either disrupt the discovery process (e.g., promote a fast, incomplete scanning of alternatives) or serve to side-track the decisionmaker away from the pursuit of top-priority goals. How impulsivity and emotionality can act in such ways has already been described . Two other moderating traits include inhibition (or shyness) and sensation-seeking [1]. The developmental literature on personality suggests that the expression of these traits changes with age, but these changes occur at different points in development for different traits [1,35]. For researchers interested in the particular contrast between child and adolescent decision-making, the trait of sensation-seeking would be relevant because this trait seems to be more prevalent in adolescence than in childhood [36]. For those interested in the contrast between adolescent and adult decision-making, however, the trait of emotionality would be relevant because it shows an apparent decrease between adolescence and adulthood. Thus, the strength of these moderators do change over time, but to my knowledge no one has examined age changes in the use of counteractive measures. If
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counteractive measures are used infrequently at all ages, then developmental changes in these personality traits might directly translate into developmental changes in the proportion of suboptimal choices [37]. Before moving on, it is useful to note that there are other moderating influences besides those reviewed by Byrnes [1]. One particularly salient example is peer influence. Peers can make it either easy or difficult for a young decision-maker to pursue goals. When peers have similar goals, a decision-maker is not faced with the challenge of how to maintain positive peer relations while pursuing peer-incompatible goals. Moreover, a decision-maker would not tend to be distracted from these goals. When an individual and his/her peers have dissimilar goals, however, adaptive goal coordination is more difficult and peers serve as a form of distraction. Recent studies have shown that peers do, in fact, affect the extent of risk-taking in children and adolescents [34,37–39]. Choices and Learning So far in this paper, the focus has been on the literature that pertains to Steps 1 through 3 in the decision-making process. The utility of focusing on these predecisional processes is that they collectively determine the choices that someone makes in a particular decision. As such, a researcher could appeal to these processes when asked, “Why did he/ she choose that option?” An alternative research strategy would be to ignore these predecisional processes and simply document the frequency with which individuals in various age groups make objectively poor choices (e.g., engage in unprotected sex, use illicit drugs, binge drink, drive while intoxicated, spend excessive amounts on gambling, smoke cigarettes). One particularly troubling finding in the developmental literature is that adolescents are more likely to engage in these behaviors than children [6]. The same literature suggests that a controversy has arisen over the issue of whether this increase is maintained into early adulthood. In my view, this controversy is somewhat beside the point in the sense that it does not bring us any closer to understanding how to reduce the incidence of poor choices in adolescents (or adults for that matter). In contrast, a focus on age differences in predecisional activities would help us gain insight into the reasons for their choices and, consequently, possible ways to intervene. Following a similar logic, it would also be important to consider what happens after a decision has
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been implemented. It has often been said (but rarely shown) that a competent decision-maker is someone who learns from mistakes [1]. Learning is, after all, the mechanism by which we gain the knowledge that helps us recognize good options on our own. Research shows that learning is by no means automatic when people are shown the errors of their ways. Three factors that limit the extent to which we learn from mistakes (our own and those of our peers) are: (a) the personality trait of dogmatism [40], (b) an inadequate conceptual base [23], and (c) the extent to which we consider ourselves similar to individuals who are likely to make a particular mistake [41]. Byrnes et al. [23] showed in two experiments that adults were more likely to learn from feedback than adolescents. As a result, age differences in the selection of good choices increased over time. Of the three impediments to learning, conceptual misunderstandings may have been the most important developmental factor in that study (i.e., younger children may not have understood the meaning of feedback).
Summary What can be said about the development of decisionmaking skills? This brief review suggests that questions (a) through (f) have not been given enough attention to warrant firm conclusions at this point. Decision-making competence is multifaceted, domain specific, and context specific. Age differences (favoring adults) have been found for certain aspects of this competence (i.e., advice-seeking, evaluation processes, adaptive goal-setting, and learning), but consistent differences have not yet been found for other aspects (i.e., knowledge of options, certain moderating factors, and avoiding certain unwise alternatives). Moreover, age differences in predecisional aspects of competence have not yet been linked to age differences in the tendency to pursue good options, although one recent study did find a possible link between a postdecisional process (i.e., learning) and age differences in the selection of good options. On the whole, however, the evidence is slowly beginning to suggest that there may be nontrivial differences in the decision-making skills of children, adolescents, and adults that may require some form of targeted intervention.
Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Research In my view, there are three important lines of research that need to be conducted. The first should
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attempt to provide more complete answers to questions a through f above. The general approach would involve: (a) finding representative samples of children, adolescents, and adults; (b) investigating the extent to which individuals in each age group demonstrate predecisional and postdecisional aspects of competence in appropriate contexts (e.g., adviceseeking when uncertain); (c) utilizing diverse measurement techniques (i.e., experimental tasks, questionnaires, and interviews) to assess the expression of these aspects across multiple topic areas (e.g., consumer choices, health-related choices, social choices); and (d) linking performance on each aspect of competence to the frequency with which individuals in each age group discover the best option in a particular circumstance. Ultimately, this first line of research will identify the aspects of decision-making competence that truly seem to improve between childhood and adulthood. Simultaneously, this line will identify the aspects that should be the targets of interventions (i.e., the aspects that do not improve). The second line of research should be experimental investigations of the effectiveness of interventions programs that are based on the findings of the first line of research. There are many ways to target the expected cause of some problem, but only some of these approaches will turn out to be effective. As a possible means of identifying plausible approaches, a third line of research should be initiated that attempts to document the natural history of decisionmaking skills. One technique would be to locate groups of highly successful and less successful children, adolescents, and adults. Then researchers could focus on two questions: (a) How do these groups differ in terms of predecisional and postdecisional processes? and (b) How do they differ in terms of their sociocultural circumstances (e.g., the frequency with which they find themselves in riskproducing contexts; the extent to which their parents foster autonomy, monitor them, and model competent decision-making; characteristics of their peer group)? The third line of research will help us understand who develops decision-making competence and why. Understanding this process will provide further insight into possible ways to improve the decision-making skills of less competent individuals and help them to attain important life goals.
References 1. Byrnes JP. The Nature and Development of Decision-Making: A Self-Regulation Model. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998.
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