Decisions: Studying and Supporting People Facing Hard Choices

by Baruch Fischhoff

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

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

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

198 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 14, 2025

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fischhoff was my PhD advisor (I studied health applications very similar to those mentioned in the book) and I can attest he is a brilliant scientist and an excellent writer (he is also extremely kind and generous, and seems to have a fascinating personal anecdote or trivia fact on pretty much any topic; all of these qualities were on excellent display throughout the book ). So, while don’t always relish reading general audience treatments of my research discipline, I knew this one would be excellent, and Fischhoff did not disappoint at all. It’s an engaging blend of summary of the field (concise without feeling rushed) and recounting of the author’s personal experiences tackling both basic and applied decision making issues over the course of his career, delivered with his trademark engaging and personable style, humility, and generosity to collaborators, and students (it was a treat to see many friends and colleagues from my academic career featured in project summaries and footnotes). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the field, the general question of how to support people facing tough decisions, or in scientific memoirs (though I suspect the author would dislike this characterization, preferring for readers’ focus to be on the science, his many collaborators, or the people served by their research).

[David Jonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Baruch wrote “I wrote a book offering my perspective on the field that I ended up in (decision making). I dedicated it to the mentors who had the biggest impact on my life. You [David Jonah] are one of them.

I tell people that I learned to write by learning to do proofs, clearly defining terms and working from them. I also tell people about the influence of three books that you gave me, by Hardy, Gauss, and Neugebauer, with the lesson of working on problems from the primitives.

The book is both a tutorial and a technical book with detailed notes and references for the experts in the field. Very few authors are able to do both in single book.

Do read it. Teach from it. Share it friends. Use it your life, by far the best way to understand what Baruch is presetting about the art of decision making.