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Annual Review of Sociology

Decision-Making Processes
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in Social Contexts
Elizabeth Bruch1 and Fred Feinberg2
1
Department of Sociology and Complex Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Michigan 48104; email: ebruch@umich.edu
2
Ross School of Business and Department of Statistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Michigan 48109; email: feinf@umich.edu

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2017. 43:207–27 Keywords

First published as a Review in Advance on May 12, decision making, discrete choice, heuristics, microsociology
2017

The Annual Review of Sociology is online at Abstract

soc.annualreviews.org
Over the past half century, scholars in the interdisciplinary field of judgment
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-060116- and decision making have amassed a trove of findings, theories, and prescrip-
053622
tions regarding the processes ordinary people enact when making choices.
Copyright  c 2017 by Annual Reviews. This body of knowledge, however, has had little influence on sociology. So-
All rights reserved
ciological research on choice emphasizes how features of the social environ-
ment shape individual outcomes, not people’s underlying decision processes.
ANNUAL
REVIEWS Further Our aim in this article is to provide an overview of selected ideas, models, and
Click here to view this article's data sources from decision research that can fuel new lines of inquiry into
online features:
• Download figures as PPT slides how socially situated actors navigate both everyday and major life choices.
• Navigate linked references
• Download citations We also highlight opportunities and challenges for cross-fertilization be-
• Explore related articles
• Search keywords tween sociology and decision research that can allow each field to expand its
range of inquiry.

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INTRODUCTION
Over the past several decades, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of how
people make decisions and an explosion of interest in this topic. From Daniel Kahneman’s 2002
Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on heuristics and biases (Kahneman &Tversky
1979; Tversky & Kahneman 1981, 1992), to the rise in prominence of behavioral economics,
to the burgeoning policy applications of behavioral “nudges” (Camerer & Loewenstein 2004,
Kahneman 2003, Shafir 2013), both scholars and policy makers have increasingly focused on
choice processes as a key domain of research and intervention. Researchers in the interdisciplinary
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field of judgment and decision making ( JDM)—which primarily comprises cognitive science,
behavioral economics, academic marketing, and organizational behavior—have generated a wealth
of findings, insights, and prescriptions regarding how people make choices. In addition, with the
advent of rich observational data from purchase histories, a related line of work has revolutionized
statistical models of decision making that aim to represent underlying choice process.
For the most part, however, these models and ideas have not penetrated sociology.1 We believe
there are several reasons for this. First, JDM research has largely focused on contrasting how a fully
informed, computationally unlimited (i.e., “rational”) person would behave with how people be-
have in real life, and on pointing out systematic deviations from this normative model (Loewenstein
2001). Because sociology never fully embraced the rational choice model of behavior, debunking
it has been less of a disciplinary priority.2 Second, JDM research is best known for its focus both
on problems that involve risk, where the outcome is probabilistic and the payoff probabilities
are known (Kahneman & Tversky 1979, 1982, 1984), and on ambiguity, where the outcome is
probabilistic and the decision maker does not have complete information on payoff probabilities
(Camerer & Weber 1992, Einhorn & Hogarth 1988, Ellsberg 1961). In both these cases, there
is an optimal choice to be made, and the research explores how people’s choices deviate from it.
Most sociological problems, however—such as choosing a romantic partner, neighborhood, or
college—are characterized by obscurity: There is no single, obvious, optimal, or correct answer.
Perhaps most critically, the JDM literature has by and large minimized the role of social con-
text in decision processes. This is deliberate. Most experiments performed by psychologists are
designed to isolate processes that can be connected with features of decision tasks or brain func-
tioning; it is incumbent on researchers working in this tradition to “desocialize” the environment
and reduce it to a single aspect or a theoretically predicted confluence of factors. Although there is a
rich body of work on how heuristics are matched to particular decision environments (Gigerenzer
& Gaissmaier 2011), these environments are by necessity often highly stylized laboratory con-
structs aimed at exerting control over key features of the environment.3 This line of work in-
tentionally de-emphasizes or eliminates aspects of realistic social environments, which limits its
obvious relevance for sociologists.
Finally, there is the challenge of data availability: Sociologists typically do not observe the in-
termediate stages by which people arrive at decision outcomes. For example, researchers can fairly
easily determine what college people attended, what job they chose, or whom they married, but

1
A notable exception is Simon’s (1997) concept of “satisficing,” which many influential sociological works—especially in
the subfield of economic sociology—have incorporated into models of action and behavior (e.g., Baker 1984, Beckert 1996,
Granovetter 1985, Uzzi 1997).
2
Although rational choice has had a strong influence on sociological research—for example, Coleman’s (1994) Foundations of
Social Theory has been cited almost 30,000 times, and there is a journal, Rationality and Society, devoted to related topics—this
framework never overtook the discipline as it did economics.
3
Although this is accurate as a broad characterization, there are studies that examine decision making “in the wild” through
observation or field experiments (e.g., Barberis 2013, Camerer 2004).

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they rarely observe how they got to that decision—that is, how they learned about and evaluated
available options, and which options were excluded because they were either infeasible or unac-
ceptable. Such process data, however, can be collected in a number of different ways, as detailed
later in this article. Moreover, opportunities to study sociologically relevant decision processes are
rapidly expanding, owing to the advent of disintermediated sources like the Internet and smart-
phones, which allow researchers to observe human behavior at a much finer level of temporal and
geographic granularity than ever before. Equally important, these data often contain information
on which options people considered but ultimately decided against. Such activity data provide a
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rich source of information on sociologically relevant decision processes (Bruch et al. 2016).
We believe that the time is ripe for a new line of work that draws on insights from cognitive
science and decision theory to examine choice processes and how they play out in social environ-
ments. As we discuss in the next section, sociology and decision research offer complementary
perspectives on decision making, and there is much to be gained from combining them. One
benefit of this union is that it can deepen sociologists’ understanding of how and why individ-
ual outcomes differ across contexts. By leveraging insights on how contextual factors and aspects
of choice problems influence decision strategies, sociologists can better pinpoint how, why, and
when features of the social environment trigger and shape human behavior. This also presents a
unique opportunity for cross-fertilization. Sociologists can draw from the choice literature’s rich
understanding of and suite of tools to probe decision processes, and work on decision making can
benefit from sociologists’ insights into how social context enables or constrains behavior.
The JDM literature is enormous; our goal here is to offer a curated introduction aimed at
social scientists new to this area. In addition to citing recent studies, we deliberately reference the
classic and integrative literature in this field so that researchers can acquaint themselves with the
works that introduced these ideas. We highlight empirical studies of decision making that help
address how people make critical life decisions, such as choosing a neighborhood, college, life
partner, or occupation. Thus, our focus is on research that is relevant for understanding decision
processes characterized by obscurity, where there is no obvious correct or optimal answer. Due
to its selective nature, our review does not include a discussion of several major areas of the
JDM literature, most notably prospect theory, which focuses on how people can distort both
probabilities and outcome values when these are known (to the researcher) with certainty; we also
do not discuss the wide range of anomalies documented in human cognition, for example, mental
accounting, the endowment effect, and biases such as availability or anchoring (Kahneman et al.
1991; Tversky & Kahneman 1973, 1981).
The balance of the article is as follows. We first explain how decision research emerged as a
critique of rational choice theory, and we show how these models of behavior complement existing
work on action and decision making in sociology. The core of the article provides an overview
of how cognitive, emotional, and contextual factors shape decision processes. We then introduce
the data and methods commonly used to study choice processes. Decision research relies on a
variety of data sources, including results from lab and field experiments, surveys, brain scans,
and observations of in-store shopping and other behavior. We discuss their relative merits and
provide a brief introduction to statistical modeling approaches. We close with some thoughts
about opportunities and challenges for sociologists wanting to incorporate insights and methods
from the decision literature into their research programs.

SOCIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

ON DECISION PROCESSES
To understand how sociology and psychology offer distinct but complementary views of decision
processes, we begin with a brief introduction to the dominant model of human decision making in

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the social sciences: rational choice theory. This model, rooted in neoclassical economic analyses,
has permeated into many fields, including sociology, anthropology, political science, philosophy,
history, and law (Coleman 1994, Gely & Spiller 1990, Levy 1997, Satz & Ferejohn 1994). In
its classic form, the rational choice model of behavior assumes that decision makers have full
knowledge of the relevant aspects of their environment, a stable set of preferences for evaluating
choice alternatives, and unlimited skills in computation (Becker 1993, Samuelson 1947, Von
Neumann & Morgenstern 2007). Actors are assumed to have a complete inventory of possible
alternatives of action; there is no allowance for focus of attention or a search for new alternatives
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(Simon 1991, p. 4). Indeed, a distinguishing feature of the classic model is its lack of attention
to the process of decision making. Preference maximization is a synonym for choice (McFadden
1999, p. 77).
Rational choice has a long tradition in sociology, but its popularity increased in the 1980s and
1990s, partly as a response to concerns within sociology about the growing gap between social
theory and quantitative empirical research (Coleman 1986). Quantitative data analysis, despite
focusing primarily on individual-level outcomes, is typically conducted without any reference to—
let alone a model of—individual action (Esser 1996, Goldthorpe 1996). Rational choice provides
a theory of action that can anchor empirical research in meaningful descriptions of individual
behavior (Hedström & Swedberg 1996). Importantly, the choice behavior of rational actors can
also be straightforwardly implemented in regression-based models readily available in statistical
software packages. Indeed, whereas some scholars explicitly embrace rational choice as a model of
behavior (Hechter & Kanazawa 1997, Kroneberg & Kalter 2012), many others implicitly adopt it
in their quantitative models of individual behavior.
Sociologists have critiqued and extended the classical rational choice model in a number of
ways. They have observed that people are not always selfish actors who behave in their own best
interests (England 1989, Margolis 1982), that preferences are not fixed characteristics of individuals
(Lindenberg & Frey 1993, Munch 1992), and that individuals do not always behave in ways that
are purposive or optimal (Somers 1998, Vaughan 1998). Most relevant to this article, sociologists
have argued that the focus of classical rational choice models on the individual as the primary
unit of decision making represents a fundamentally asocial representation of behavior. In moving
beyond rational choice, theories of decision making in sociology highlight the importance of social
interactions and relationships in shaping behavior (Emirbayer 1997, Pescosolido 1992). A large
body of empirical work reveals how social context shapes people’s behavior across a wide range
of domains, from neighborhood and school choice to decisions about friendship and intimacy,
to preferences about eating, drinking, and other health-related behaviors (Carrillo et al. 2016,
Pachucki et al. 2011, Perna & Titus 2005, Rosenquist et al. 2010, Small 2009).
This focus on social environments and social interactions, however, has inevitably led re-
searchers to pay less attention to the individual-level processes that underlie decision making. In
contrast, psychologists and decision theorists aiming to move beyond rational choice have focused
their attention squarely on how individuals make decisions. In doing so, they have amassed several
decades of work showing that the rational choice model is a poor representation of this process.4
Their fundamental critique is that decision making, as envisioned in the rational choice paradigm,
would make overwhelming demands on individuals’ capacity to process information (Malhotra

4
The best-known critique of the rational choice model within JDM comes from the “heuristics and biases” school of research
(Kahneman & Tversky 1979, Tversky & Kahneman 1981). Studies in this tradition show that decision makers: (a) have trouble
processing information; (b) use decision-making heuristics that do not maximize preferences; (c) are sensitive to context and
process; and (d ) systematically misperceive features of their environment. A large body of work provides convincing evidence
that individuals are limited information processing systems (Kahneman 2003, Malhotra 1982, Newell & Simon 1972).

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1982, Miller 1956, Payne 1976). Decision makers have limited time for learning about choice
alternatives, limited working memory, and limited computational capabilities (Miller 1956, Payne
et al. 1993). As a result, they use heuristics that keep the information-processing demands of a task
within the bounds of their limited cognitive capacity.5 It is now widely recognized that the central
process in human problem solving is to apply heuristics that carry out highly efficient navigations
of problem spaces (Newell & Simon 1972).
However, in their efforts to zero in on the strategies people use to gather and process infor-
mation, psychological studies of decision making have focused largely on individuals in isolation.
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Thus, sociological and psychological perspectives on choice are complementary in that each em-
phasizes a feature of decision making that the other field has left largely undeveloped. For this
reason, and as we articulate further in the conclusion, we believe there is great potential for cross-
fertilization between these areas of research. Because our central aim is to introduce sociologists to
the JDM literature, we do not provide an exhaustive discussion of sociological work relevant to un-
derstanding decision processes. Rather, we highlight studies that illustrate the fruitful connections
between sociological concerns and JDM research.
In the next sections, we discuss the role of different factors—cognitive, emotional, and
contextual—in heuristic decision processes.

THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE FACTORS IN DECISION PROCESSES

There are two major challenges in processing decision-related information: First, each choice
is typically characterized by multiple attributes, and no alternative is optimal on all dimensions;
second, more than a tiny handful of information can overwhelm the cognitive capacity of deci-
sion makers (Cowan 2010, Payne & Bettman 2004). Consider the problem of choosing among
three competing job offers: Job 1 offers a high salary, a moderate commuting time, and a family-
unfriendly workplace; job 2 offers a low salary, a family-friendly workplace, and short commuting
time; job 3 offers a family-friendly workplace, a moderate salary, and long commuting time. This
choice would be easy if one alternative clearly dominated on all attributes, but as is often the case,
each choice involves making trade-offs and requires the decision maker to weigh the relative im-
portance of each attribute. Now imagine that, instead of three choices, there were ten, a hundred,
or even a thousand potential alternatives. This illustrates the cognitive challenge faced by people
trying to decide among neighborhoods, potential romantic partners, job opportunities, or health
care plans.
We focus in this section on choices that involve deliberation, for example, deciding where to
live, what major to pursue in college, or what jobs to apply for.6 [This is in contrast to decisions that
are made more spontaneously, such as the choice to disclose personal information to a confidant
(see Small & Sukhu 2016).] Commencing with the pioneering work of Howard & Sheth (1969),
scholars have accumulated substantial empirical evidence for the idea that such decisions are
typically made sequentially, with each stage reducing the set of potential options (Roberts &
Lattin 1991, 1997; Swait 1984). For a given individual, the set of potential options can first be

5
Heuristics are “problem-solving methods that tend to produce efficient solutions to difficult problems by restricting the
search through the space of possible solutions, on the basis of some evaluation of the structure of the problem” (Braunstein
1972, p. 520).
6
The decision strategies presented in this section are sometimes known as “reasons” heuristics (see Gigerenzer 2004) because
they are the reasons people give to explain why they chose the way that they did. As such, they are less applicable in situations
in which people have few if any options. For example, individuals evicted from their homes may have a single alternative to
homelessness: staying with a family member. In this case, the difficulty of the decision is not information processing.

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divided into those that he or she knows about, and those he or she is unaware of. This “awareness
set” is further divided into options the person would consider and those that are irrelevant or
unattainable. This smaller set is referred to as the “consideration set,” and the final decision is
restricted to options within that set (Howard & Sheth 1969).
Research in consumer behavior suggests that the decision to include certain alternatives in the
consideration set can be based on heuristics and criteria that are markedly different from those
that guide the final choice (e.g., Bettman & Park 1980, Payne 1976, Salisbury & Feinberg 2012).
In many cases, people use simple rules to limit the energy involved in searching for options or to
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eliminate options from future consideration. For example, high school students applying to college
may only consider schools within commuting distance of home or schools attended by someone
they know. Essentially, earlier in the decision process people favor less cognitively taxing rules that
use a small number of choice attributes to eliminate almost all potential alternatives, but they take
into account a wider range of choice attributes when evaluating the few remaining alternatives for
the final decision (Liu & Dukes 2013, Johnson & Payne 1985).
Once the decision maker has narrowed down his or her options, the final choice may allow
different dimensions of alternatives to be compensatory: In other words, a less attractive value on
one attribute may be offset by a more attractive value on another attribute. However, a large body
of decision research demonstrates that strategies to screen potential options for consideration
are noncompensatory: A decision maker’s choice to eliminate or include an alternative based on
one attribute will not be compensated by the value of other attributes. In other words, compen-
satory decision rules are continuous, whereas noncompensatory decision rules are discontinuous
or threshold (Gilbride & Allenby 2004, Swait 2001).

Compensatory Decision Rules

The implicit decision rule used in statistical models of individual choice, and the normative decision
rule for rational choice, is the weighted additive rule. Under this choice regime, decision makers
compute a weighted sum of all relevant attributes of potential alternatives. Choosers develop an
overall assessment of each choice alternative by multiplying the attribute weight by the attribute
level (for each salient attribute) and then sum all attributes. This produces a single utility value for
each alternative. By assumption, decision makers select the alternative with the highest value. Any
conflict in values is assumed to be confronted and resolved by explicitly considering the extent to
which the chooser is willing to trade off attribute values, as reflected by the relative importance
or beta coefficients (Payne et al. 1993, p. 24). Using this rule involves substantial computational
effort and processing of information.
A simpler compensatory decision rule is the tallying rule, known to most of us as a pro-and-con
list (Alba & Marmorstein 1987). This strategy ignores information about the relative importance
of each attribute. To implement this heuristic, decision makers decide which attribute values are
desirable or undesirable; then, they count up the number of desirable versus undesirable attributes.
Strictly speaking, this rule forces people to make trade-offs among different attributes; however, it
is less cognitively demanding than the weighted additive rule, because it does not require people
to specify precise weights associated with each attribute. However, both rules require people to
examine all information available for each alternative, determine the sums associated with each
alternative, and compare those sums.

Noncompensatory Decision Rules

Noncompensatory decision rules do not require decision makers to consider all salient attributes
of an alternative, assign numeric weights to each attribute, or mentally compute weighted sums.

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Thus, they are far less cognitively taxing than compensatory rules. The decision maker need only
examine the attributes that define cutoffs in order to make a decision (to exclude options for a
conjunctive rule or to include them for a disjunctive one). The fewer the attributes that are used
to evaluate a choice alternative, the less taxing the rule will be.
Conjunctive rules require that an alternative must be acceptable on one or more salient at-
tributes. For example, in the context of residential choice, a house that is unaffordable will
never be chosen, no matter how attractive it is. Similarly, a man looking for romantic part-
ners on an online dating website may only search for someone who is within a 25-mile ra-
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dius and does not have children. Potential partners who are unacceptable on either dimension
are eliminated from consideration. Therefore, conjunctive screening rules identify deal break-
ers: Being acceptable on all dimensions is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for being
chosen.
A disjunctive rule dictates that an alternative is considered if at least one of its attributes
is acceptable to the chooser. For example, a sociology department hiring committee may al-
ways interview candidates with four or more American Journal of Sociology publications, regardless
of their teaching record or quality of recommendations. Similarly (an especially evocative yet
somewhat fanciful example), a disjunctive rule might occur for the stereotypical gold-digger or
gigolo, who targets all potential mates with very high incomes regardless of their other qual-
ities. Disjunctive heuristics are also known as take-the-best or one-good-reason heuristics, be-
cause they base any decision on a single overriding factor, ignoring all other attributes of de-
cision outcomes (Gigerenzer 2008, Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier 2011, Gigerenzer & Goldstein
1999).
Although sociologists studying various forms of deliberative choice do not typically identify
the decision rules used, a handful of empirical studies demonstrate that people do not consider
all salient attributes of all potential choice alternatives. For example, Krysan & Bader (2009)
find that white Chicago residents have pronounced neighborhood blind spots that essentially
restrict their knowledge of the city to a small number of ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods.
Dawes & Brown (2002, 2005) find that, when choosing a college, UK students’ awareness and
choice sets differ systematically by socioeconomic status. Finally, in a recent study of online mate
choice, Bruch and colleagues (2016) build on insights from marketing and decision research to
develop a statistical model that allows for multistage decision processes with different (potentially
noncompensatory) decision rules at each stage. They find that conjunctive screeners are common
at the initial stage of online mate pursuit and that precise cutoffs differ by gender and other
factors.

THE ROLE OF EMOTIONAL FACTORS IN DECISION PROCESSES

Early decision research emphasized the role of cognitive processes in decision making (e.g., Newell
& Simon 1972). More recent work, by contrast, shows that emotions—not just strong emotions
like anger and fear, but also the “faint whispers of emotions” known as affect (Slovic et al. 2004,
p. 312)—play an important role in decision making. Decisions are cast with a certain valence, and
this shapes the choice process on both conscious and unconscious levels. In other words, even
seemingly deliberative decisions, like what school to attend or what job to take, may be based not
only on a careful processing of information, but also on intuitive judgments of how a particular
outcome feels (Lerner et al. 2015, Loewenstein & Lerner 2003). This is true even in situations
where there is numeric information about the likelihood of certain events (Denes-Raj & Epstein
1994, Slovic et al. 2000, Windschitl & Weber 1999). This section focuses on two topics central to
this area: first, the observation that people dislike making emotional trade-offs and will go to great

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lengths to avoid them, and second, the analysis of how emotional factors serve as direct inputs
into decision processes.7

Emotions Shape Strategies for Processing Information

In the previous section, we emphasized that compensatory decision rules that involve trade-offs
require a great deal of cognitive effort. However, there are other reasons why people avoid making
explicit trade-offs on choice attributes. For one, some trade-offs are more emotionally difficult than
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others: for example, the decision about whether to stay at home with one’s children or put them
in day care. Some choices also involve attributes that are considered sacred or protected (Baron
& Spranca 1997). People prefer not to make these emotionally difficult trade-offs, and that shapes
decision strategy selection (Baron 1986, Baron & Spranca 1997, Hogarth 1991). Experiments on
these types of emotional decisions have shown that, when facing emotionally difficult decisions,
decision makers avoid compensatory evaluation and instead select the alternative that is most
attractive on whatever dimension is difficult to trade off (Luce et al. 1999, 2001). Thus, the
emotional valence of specific options shapes decision strategies.
Emotions concerning the entire set of choice alternatives—specifically, whether they are per-
ceived as overall favorable or unfavorable—also affect strategy selection. Early work with rats
suggests that decisions are relatively easy when the choice is between two desirable options with
no downsides (Miller 1959). However, when deciding between options with both desirable and un-
desirable attributes, the choice becomes harder. When deciding between two undesirable options,
the choice is hardest of all. Subsequent work reveals that this finding extends to human choice.
For instance, people invoke different choice strategies when forced to choose the lesser of two
evils. In their experiments on housing choice, Luce and colleagues (2000) found that when faced
with a set of substandard options, people are far more likely to engage in maximizing behavior and
select the alternative with the best value on whatever is perceived as the dominant substandard
feature. In other words, having a suboptimal choice set reduces the likelihood of trade-offs on
multiple attributes. Extending this idea to a different sociological context, a woman confronted
with a dating pool filled with individuals she perceives as arrogant partners may focus her attention
on selecting the least arrogant of the group.

Emotions as Information
Emotions also serve as direct inputs into the decision process. A large body of work on perceptions
of risk shows that a key way people evaluate the risks and benefits of a given situation is through
their emotional response (Loewenstein et al. 2001, Slovic 1987, Slovic & Peters 2006, Slovic
et al. 2004). In a foundational and generative study, Fischhoff and colleagues (1978) discovered
that people’s perceptions of risks decline as perceived benefits increase. This is puzzling, because
risks and benefits tend to be positively correlated. The authors also noted that the attribute most
highly correlated with perceived risk was the extent to which the item in question evoked a feeling
of dread. This finding has been confirmed in many other studies (e.g., McDaniels et al. 1997).
Subsequent work also showed that this inverse relationship is linked to the strength of positive or

7
There is a rich literature in sociology on how emotions are inputs to and outcomes of social processes (e.g., Hochschild 1989,
Scheff 1988). Although historically this work has not been integrated with psychology (Stets & Turner 2014, p. 2), this may
be a fruitful direction for future research.

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negative affect associated with the stimulus. In other words, stronger negative responses lead to
the perception of greater risks and lower benefits (Alhakami & Slovic 1994, Slovic & Peters 2006).
This has led to a large body of work on the affect heuristic, which is grounded in the ideas
that people have positive and negative associations with different stimuli and that they consult
this “affect pool” when making judgments. This shortcut is often more efficient and easier than
cognitive strategies such as weighing pros and cons or even disjunctive rules for evaluating the
relative merits of each choice outcome (Slovic et al. 2004). Affect—particularly the way it relates
to decision making—is rooted in dual-process accounts of human behavior. The basic idea is
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that people experience the world in two different ways: one that is fast, intuitive, automatic, and
unconscious, and another that is slow, analytical, deliberate, and verbal (Evans 2008, Kahneman
2011). A defining characteristic of the intuitive, automatic system is its affective basis (Epstein
1994). Indeed, affective reactions to stimuli are often the very first reactions people have. Having
determined what is salient in a given situation, affect thus guides subsequent processes, such as
information processing, that are central to cognition (Zajonc 1980).
Over the past two decades, sociologists—particularly in the study of culture—have incorporated
insights from dual-process theory to understand how actions may be both deliberate and automatic
(e.g., Vaisey 2009). Small & Sukhu (2016) argue that dual processes may play an important role in
the mobilization of support networks. Kroneberg and Esser (Esser & Kroneberg 2015, Kroneberg
2014) explore how automatic and deliberative processes shape how people select the frame for
making sense of a particular situation. Although some scholars debate whether automatic and
deliberative processes should be considered as polar extremes or rather a smooth continuum (for
an example of this critique within sociology, see Leschziner & Green 2013), the dual-process
model remains a useful framework for theorizing about behavior.

THE ROLE OF CONTEXTUAL FACTORS IN DECISION PROCESSES

Sociologists have long been interested in how social environments—for example, living in a poor
neighborhood, attending an affluent school, or growing up in a single-parent household—shape
life outcomes such as high school graduation, nonmarital fertility, and career aspirations (Astone
& McLanahan 1991, Lee et al. 1993, Sharkey & Faber 2014). Social environments shape behav-
ior directly, through various forms of influence such as peer pressure and social learning, and
indirectly, by dictating what opportunities or social positions are available (Blalock 1984, Manski
2000, Schelling 1971). However, whereas the sociological literature on contextual effects is vast,
the subset of that work that focuses on decisions emphasizes the causes or consequences of those
decisions more than the processes through which they are made.
Decision researchers devote considerable attention to contextual effects, but typically “context”
in this field refers to: the architectural features of choice environments, such as the number of
alternatives; whether time pressures limit the effort that can be put into a decision; and what option
is emphasized as the default. (In the world, of course, these features are socially determined, but
this is less emphasized in decision research, much of which occurs in a laboratory setting.) The
overwhelming finding from these studies is that people’s choices are highly sensitive to context.
This insight has led to an influential literature on the construction of preferences (see the sidebar
titled The Construction of Preferences) as well as a great deal of interest in policy interventions
that manipulate features of choice environments (Shafir 2013, Thaler & Sunstein 2008). Recently,
decision researchers have begun to look at how decisions are shaped by broader social environments
such as poverty (e.g., Mullainathan & Shafir 2013). In this section, we discuss how four aspects
of social context—the opportunities that are available, the importance of the default option, time
pressure and constrained resources, and the choices of others—shape decision processes.

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THE CONSTRUCTION OF PREFERENCES

Decision researchers have amassed substantial evidence suggesting that, rather than being stable constructs that are
retrieved on demand, preferences are constructed in the moment of elicitation (Bettman et al. 1998, Lichtenstein
& Slovic 2006). This finding is echoed in studies of judgments and attitudes, which are also sensitive to contextual
cues (Ross & Nisbett 1991; Schwarz 1999, 2007). Preference variation can be generated from simple anchors or
changes in question wording (e.g., Mandel & Johnson 2002). A classic finding is that people exhibit preference
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reversals when making multiattribute choices: In one context they may indicate a preference for A over B, but in
another context they may indicate they prefer B over A (e.g., Cox & Grether 1996, Seidl 2002). Several theories
have been put forward to explain this effect (see Lichtenstein & Slovic 2006, chapter 1, for a review and synthesis).
One explanation is that people’s preferences, attitudes, and judgments reflect what comes to mind at a particular
moment, and what is salient at one time point may not be salient at another (Higgins 1996, Schwarz et al. 1991).

Choice Sets and Defaults

A classic assumption of conventional choice models is that the ratio of choice probabilities for any
two options is independent of what other options are available (Luce 1959). [In the literature on
statistical models of choice, this is known as the principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives
(IIA).] However, it is well established that people’s choices depend heavily on the relative merits
of a particular set of options rather than their absolute values (Tversky & Simonson 1993). For
example, people tend to avoid more extreme values in alternatives (the so-called compromise
effect); thus, adding a new option to the mix can lead choosers to shift their views about what
constitutes a reasonable choice (Simonson 1989, Simonson & Tversky 1992). In a similar vein,
a robust finding is that adding a new asymmetrically dominated alternative—one dominated by
some items in the set but not by others—can increase the choice probabilities of the items that
dominate it. Such a “decoy effect” (Huber et al. 1982, p. 92) should be impossible under IIA, and
in fact it violates regularity (i.e., new items cannot increase the probabilities of existing ones). Both
effects have been attributed to the fact that people making choices are trying to justify them based
on reasons (Dhar et al. 2000, Simonson 1989); changing the distribution of options may alter how
compelling a particular reason might be.
Choice outcomes are also highly influenced by what option is identified as the default. Defaults
are whatever happens in a decision if the chooser decides not to decide (Feinberg & Huber 1996).
Defaults exert a strong effect on people’s choices, even when the stakes of the decision are high
( Johnson & Goldstein 2013, Johnson et al. 1993). Defaults also tap into other, well-established
features of human decision making: procrastination, bias for the status quo, and inertial behavior
(Kahneman et al. 1991, Samuelson & Zeckhauser 1988). In recent years, manipulating the default
option—for example, making retirement savings or organ donation something people opt out of
rather than into—has been identified as a potentially low-cost, high-impact policy intervention
(Shafir 2013). Defaults are also of potentially great sociological interest. A number of sociological
studies have theorized how people “drift” into particular outcomes or situations (e.g., Matza 1967);
defaults exist in part because choices are embedded in specific environments that emphasize one
set of options over others.8

8
We are grateful for conversations with Rob Sampson and Mario Small that led to this insight.

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Scarcity and Social Influence

A number of recent studies examine how conditions of scarcity—with regard to time, resources, and
energy—shape decision making. Consistent with studies of cognitive effort and decision making,
a variety of experimental results demonstrate that time pressure reduces people’s tendency to
make trade-offs (Edland 1989, Rieskamp & Hoffrage 2008, Wright & Weitz 1977). This finding
is especially interesting in light of recent work by Shah et al. (2015), which shows experimentally
that resource scarcity forces people to make trade-offs—e.g., “If I buy dessert, I can’t afford to
take the bus home.” Weighing trade-offs is cognitively costly; they deplete people’s resources for
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other decision tasks, which overall reduces their ability to engage in deliberative decision making
(Pocheptsova et al. 2009). Given the fact that people living in conditions of extreme scarcity are
typically limited in both time and financial resources, a cognitive perspective suggests that they
are doubly taxed in terms of cognitive effort, and it offers important insights in understanding how
conditions of poverty shape, and are shaped by, people’s choices (Bertrand et al. 2004). In short,
the context of poverty depletes people’s cognitive resources in an environment in which mistakes
are costly (Gennetian & Shafir 2015, Mullainathan & Shafir 2013).
There is also a small number of studies that examine how the actions of other people influ-
ence decision processes. They focus on the role of descriptive norms (Cialdini 2003, Cialdini &
Goldstein 2004), which are information about what other people are doing. The key finding is
that people are more likely to adopt a particular behavior—such as conserving energy in one’s
home or avoiding changing sheets and towels at a hotel—if they learn that others are doing the
same (Goldstein et al. 2008a,b; Nolan et al. 2008). The more similar the comparison situation is to
one’s own, the more powerful the effect of others’ behavior. For instance, people are more likely
to be influenced if the descriptive norm references their neighbors or others with whom they share
social spaces (Schultz et al. 2007). The finding that descriptive norms are most powerful when they
are immediate is reinforced by a study of charitable giving, which shows that people’s behavior is
disproportionately influenced by information about what others have given—especially the most
recent, nonspecified donor (Shang & Croson 2009).
This work on social influence is consistent with classic literature in sociology that emphasizes
how people’s beliefs about the situation they are in shape their behavior (e.g., Goffman 1974,
Thomas & Znaniecki 1918). Social cues provide information about what choices are consistent
with desired or appropriate behavior. For example, a classic study demonstrates that whether
a Prisoner’s Dilemma game was presented to research subjects as a simulated “Wall Street” or
“community” situation shaped subsequent playing decisions (Camerer & Thaler 1995, Liberman
et al. 2004). In other words, there is an interpretive component to decision making that informs
one’s views about the kind of response that is appropriate.

STUDYING DECISION PROCESSES

Psychologists have devised a number of techniques to shed light on human decision processes in
conjunction with targeted stimuli. Process tracing is a venerated suite of methods broadly aimed at
investigating how people acquire, integrate, and evaluate information, as well as the physiological
and neurological concomitants of cognitive processes (Schulte-Mecklenbeck et al. 2010, Svenson
1979). [Note that this approach is quite different from what political scientists and sociologists
typically refer to as process tracing (see Collier 2011, Mahoney 2012).] In a classic study, Lohse &
Johnson (1996) examine individual-level information acquisition using both computerized tracing
and eye tracking across multiple process measures (e.g., total time, number of fixations, accuracy,
etc.).

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More recently, the use of unobtrusive eye trackers has allowed researchers to discern which
information is being sought and assimilated in the sort of stimuli-rich environments that typify
online interactions, without querying respondents’ knowledge or intermediate goals (Duchowski
2007, Wedel & Pieters 2008). Also, it has recently become possible to use neuroimaging techniques
like PET (positron emission tomography), EEG (electroencephalogram), and fMRI (functional
magnetic resonance imaging) (Yoon et al. 2006) to observe decision processes in vivo, although
at a high cost of invasiveness. Such studies offer the benefit of sidestepping questions about,
for example, the emotional reactions experienced by decision makers, by allowing researchers to
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observe which portions of the brain are active when information is being accessed and processed
and final decisions are arrived at.

Stated and Revealed Preferences

Although not directly focused on the process of decision making (i.e., in terms of identifying de-
cision strategies), a large literature assumes a linear compensatory model and aims to capture the
weights people ascribe to different choice attributes (see Louviere et al. 1999 for a broad overview;
see also Train 2009). These methods, long known to social scientists (Bruch & Mare 2012, Manski
& McFadden 1981, Samuelson 1948), rely on both field data—in which the analyst records de-
cision makers’ revealed preferences as reflected in their actions—and choice experiments—in
which analysts enact control over key elements of the decision environment through vignettes.
Stated-choice experiments have two advantages that are relevant in modeling choice processes:
(a) They present decision makers with options unavailable in practice or outside their usual
purview; and (b) they record multiple (hypothetical) choices for each decision maker, even for
scenarios like mate choice or home purchase that happen only few times in a life span. The down-
side is that they are difficult to fully contextualize or make compatible with incentives; for example,
experiment participants are routinely more willing to spend simulated experimental money than
their own hard-won cash (Carlsson & Martinsson 2001).
Among the main statistical methods for enacting choice experiments is conjoint analysis (Green
& Srinivasan 1978, Green et al. 2001), a broad suite of techniques implemented widely in dedi-
cated software (e.g., Sawtooth) to measure stated preferences and how they vary across a target
population. Conjoint analysis works by decomposing options into their attributes, each of which
can have several levels. For example, housing options each provide cooking facilities, sleeping
quarters, and bathrooms, among other attributes, and each of these varies in terms of its quality
levels (e.g., larger versus smaller, overall number, and categorical attributes like type of heating,
color, location, etc.). The goal of conjoint analysis is to assign a utility or “part-worth” to each
level of each attribute, with higher numbers representing preferred attribute levels; for example,
one might say that, for families with several children, a home with four bedrooms has a much
higher utility than one with two. Conjoint approaches can be—and have been (Wittink & Cattin
1989, Wittink et al. 1994)—applied to a wide range of settings in which it is useful to measure the
importance of specific choice attributes.
Field data such as residential, work, or relationship histories have the advantage of reflecting
actual choices made in real contexts (Louviere et al. 1999). However, such data suffer from several
drawbacks: (a) Variables necessarily covary (i.e., higher neighborhood prices correlate with higher
levels of many attributes at once); (b) we cannot infer how people would respond to possible novel
options, like affordable, diverse neighborhoods that may not yet exist; and (c) each person typically
makes just one choice. Such problems are exacerbated when researchers cannot in principle know
the entire consideration set of options available and actively mulled over by each decision maker,

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which is typically the case in sociological applications.9 When such confounds are present in
field data, conjoint analysis and other experimental methods allow researchers to control and
“orthogonalize” the attributes and levels used in choice experiments to achieve maximal efficiency
and avoid presenting each participant with more than a couple of dozen hypothetical choice
scenarios (Chrzan & Orme 2000).10
Two other choice assessment methods deserve brief mention, because they leverage some of
the best features of experimental and field research: natural experiments and field experiments. In
a natural experiment, an event exogenous to the outcome of interest affects only certain individuals
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or affects different individuals to varying degrees. One example is the effect of natural disasters, like
the 2005 flooding of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, on migration decisions
(Kirk 2009). In field experiments, researchers exert control over focal aspects of people’s choice
environments. Although it may seem difficult to study sociologically relevant choice processes this
way, the use of websites as search tools enables a nontrivial degree of experimental control over
choice environments (see, for example, Bapna et al. 2016).

Statistical Models of Choice Processes

The bedrock formulation of statistical analyses of choice is the random utility model, which
posits that each option available to a decision maker affords a certain value (utility), which can be
decomposed into the value explicable by the analyst and a (random) error (Ben-Akiva & Lerman
1985, Guadagni & Little 1983, Train 2009).11 The former can be related through regression-
based techniques to other observed covariates on the options, decision maker, and environment,
whereas the latter can be due to systematically unavailable information (e.g., income or education)
or intrinsic unobservables (e.g., the mood of the decision maker). Of particular importance is
McFadden’s (1973) conditional logit model,12 which allows attributes of options to vary across
choice occasions (e.g., prices or waiting times for different transportation modes, neighborhoods
or room sizes for renting versus buying a home, etc.). Because this model is supported in much
commercial statistical software and converges rapidly even for large data sets, it is by far the most
widely deployed in choice applications.
Statistical models of choice have been grounded primarily in rational utility theory, with conces-
sions to efficient estimation. As such, the utility specifications underlying such models have tended
to be linear, to include all available options, and to incorporate full information on those options.
Much research reveals not only the psychological process accuracy but also the statistical superior-
ity of relaxing these assumptions by incorporating limits on information, cognitive penalties, and

9
Newer online data sources—for example, websites for housing search and dating—generate highly granular, intermediate
data on consideration sets. This parallels a revolution that occurred among choice modelers in marketing 30 years ago: the
introduction of in-store product code scanners and household panels whose longitudinal histories provided information not
only on which options were eventually chosen, but also on which were available at the time of purchase but were rejected.
10
A review of the vast literature on choice experiment design is beyond the scope of this article, but turnkey solutions for
designing, deploying, and estimating discrete choice models for online panels are commercially available (e.g., Sawtooth
Software’s Discover).
11
There is an enormous literature on the analysis of discrete choice data—items chosen from a known array with recorded
attributes. Our treatment here is necessarily brief and highly selective. For more comprehensive introductions to this topic,
we refer the reader to the many treatments available (e.g., Ben-Akiva & Lerman 1985, Hensher et al. 2005, Louviere et al.
2000, Train 2009).
12
Empirical work typically refers to this as the multinomial logit model, although economists often distinguish the latter as
applicable when attributes (e.g., age, income), not the options themselves, change for the decision maker.

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nonlinear/noncompensatory utility. For example, the formal incorporation of consideration sets

into choice modeling (Horowitz & Louviere 1995; Louviere et al. 2000, section 10.3) has demon-
strated superior fit and predictive accuracy for explicit models of exclusion of certain options from
detailed processing; some analyses (see Hauser & Wernerfelt 1990) attribute more than 75% of the
choice model’s fit to such restrictions. Similarly, lab studies have confirmed that decision makers
wish to conserve cognitive resources, and formal statistical models (e.g., Roberts & Lattin 1991,
Shugan 1980) have attempted to account for and measure a “cost of thinking” from real-world data.
However, despite a decades-deep literature on noncompensatory evaluation processes (Einhorn
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1970), the practical estimation of such models is largely in its infancy, due to complexities of
specification and data needs (e.g., Elrod et al. 2004). Although nonlinearity can be captured using
polynomial functions of covariates, these impose smoothness of response; by contrast, conjunctive
and disjunctive processes impose cutoffs beyond which evaluation is either wholly positive or
insurmountably negative (Bruch et al. 2016). We view the development of this area of research
as critical to the widespread acceptance of formal choice models by social scientists, in particular
sociologists who typically wish to know which neighborhoods people would never live in, jobs
they would never take, etc.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Sociology has long been interested in individuals’ choices and their implications for social life, and
there is renewed interest in theories that can explain human action (e.g., Gross 2009, Kroneberg
2014). Our hope is that this review enables interested scholars to pursue a more nuanced and struc-
turally accurate representation of the choice process. Greater insight into human behavior will also
allow for greater insights into the dynamic relationship between micro- and meso-level processes
and their larger-scale implications (Hedström & Bearman 2009). Consider how choice sets are
constructed in the first place. People may rule out certain options not only due to preferences,
affordability, and/or time constraints—classic cognitive, economic, and temporal variables—but
also due to the anticipation of unfair treatment or discrimination. For example, a high school
student searching for colleges may eliminate those that are too expensive, too far from home, or
are perceived as unwelcoming. Identifying the criteria through which people rule themselves (or
others) out can illuminate more precise mechanisms through which people’s actions shape, and
are shaped by, larger-scale inequality structures.
We also believe that many of the data limitations that hampered sociologists’ ability to study
decision processes in the past are becoming far less of an issue. This is due at least in part to
increasingly available data sources that can aid sociologists in studying choice processes. These
so-called big data are often behavioral data: specific actions taken by individuals that can shed light
on processes of information search, assimilation, and choice. Moreover, the online environments
through which we increasingly communicate and interact enable not only observational field data,
but also targeted, unobtrusive experiments that directly alter the decision environment. The latter
possibility offers greater precision than ever before in isolating both idiosyncratic and potentially
universal features of behavior, as well as in understanding the interplay between context and human
action.
However, existing approaches from marketing and psychology are often not suited to soci-
ological inquiry directly out of the box, and this creates both challenges and opportunities for
future work. For example, most existing models were designed to capture prosaic decisions, like
supermarket shopping, in which attributes are known, options are stable, and stakes are modest.
Although some choices of sociological interest may fit this pattern, most do not. For example,
many pivotal life decisions—home purchases (where sellers and buyers must agree on terms),

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college admissions, dating and marriage decisions, or employment offers—require a partnership

wherein each decision maker must “choose you back.” Sociologists must therefore be circumspect
in applying models developed for choice among inert options (such as flavors of yogurt) to the
data they most commonly analyze.
The fact that so many sociological choices are characterized by obscurity (i.e., there is no
obvious or single optimal choice to be made) is also a good reason to proceed with caution in
applying ideas from JDM to sociological research. Take, for example, the literature discussed
earlier on interventions that manipulate people’s default option. It is one thing to encourage
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healthier eating by putting apples before chocolate cake in the cafeteria line; it is quite another
to nudge someone toward a particular neighborhood or school. Sociologists rarely have a clear
sense of what choice will be optimal for a group of people, let alone particular individuals. On
the other hand, few would maintain that growing up surrounded by violence is not universally
harmful (Harding 2009, Sharkey et al. 2012). Policies can only be improved by a more nuanced
understanding of how choices unfold in particular environments and how the default options are
shaped by contextual factors.
Thus, this challenge also creates the opportunity to build knowledge on how heuristics operate
under conditions of obscurity. JDM research has largely focused on documenting whether and
how heuristics fall short of some correct or optimal answer. In sociology, by contrast, we typically
lack a defensible metric for the optimality of decisions. Whereas some decisions may be worse
than others, it is impossible to know, for example, whether one has chosen the right spouse or
peer group, or how to set up appropriate counterfactual scenarios as yardsticks against which
specific decisions could be dispassionately assessed. By branching into decision domains in which
the quality or optimality of outcomes cannot be easily quantified (or in some cases even coherently
conceptualized), sociologists can not only extend the range of applications of decision research
but also break new theoretical ground.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to Scott Rick, Mario Small, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback
on this manuscript. This work was supported by a training grant (K01-HD-079554) from the
National Institute of Child and Human Development.

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