Decision-making: A century of theory-making and the synthesis of a contemporary model

Early in the 20th Century, researchers established a platform for predicting decision outcomes based upon the then current influences of mathematics, economics, and behaviourism. The focus was on predicting people's decisions based on concrete external cues of a purely 'rational' and mathematical nature. Later researchers challenged these rational approaches stating that decision-making is strongly influenced perhaps even dominated, by cognitive-affective processes. In this chapter, we propose a contemporary model of decision satisfaction that considers people's appraisal of the elements surrounding the decision, the stress people experience when making a decision, and the reciprocal relationship between decisional stress and the coping strategies used to facilitate a satisfying decision. Recent literature has provided support for the role of metacognitions: awareness and acceptance, in reducing stress and promoting wellbeing and, in a novel extension of this work, we argue that they have a positive impact on both reducing decisional stress and enhancing the use of proactive coping strategies. Empirical research to validate the proposed model is required.