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What is decision making? Psychological research is often organized around particular tasks, such as problem solving and categorization. Decision making work has also historically taken this Decision Making 2 approach. Decision situations are generally defined as those in which the decision maker has some unsatisfied goal and a set of options that might satisfy the goal. The decision maker must then evaluate the options in some way and select one. For example, a business executive may fly to Chicago and have to get from the airport to a downtown hotel. There are many ways to get there, including limousine, taxi, shuttle, and train. These options differ in their comfort, convenience and price. Typically these attributes trade off, so that higher priced options provide greater comfort and convenience. The executive might be on an expense account, in which case comfort and convenience may be factored into the decision more heavily than price. The executive may choose to ride downtown by taxi and then implement this decision by standing on line and taking a taxi to the hotel. To bring these sorts of decision situations into the laboratory, researchers commonly focused on the goal of obtaining money, which they assume is shared across people. In the prototypical task, subjects are given choice options that differ in probability and amount. The use of gambles enabled researchers to explore decision making under risk. Often, a number of different choices are made in a single experimental session, and the pa tern of choices across sets is analyzed. For example, people might be asked whether they prefer a 45 % chance to win $200 or a 50 % chance to win $150. Later in the same session, they might be asked whether they prefer a 90% chance to win $200 or a 100 % chance to win $150. At issue in studies like these is the consistency of people's choices. The analyses would involve an examination of whether the people who preferred the 45 % chance to win $200 also preferred the 90 % chance to win $200