Toward a psychology of surrogate decision-making

In everyday life many of the decisions that we make are made on behalf of other people. A growing body of research suggests that we often, but not always, make different decisions on behalf of other people than the other person would choose. This is problematic in the practical sense of legally designated surrogate decision-makers who may not meet the substituted judgment standard. Here we review evidence from studies of surrogate decision- making and examine the extent to which surrogate decision-making accurately predicts the recipient’s wishes, or if it is an incomplete or distorted application of our own decision- making processes. We find no existing domain general model of surrogate decision-making. We propose a framework by which surrogate decision-making can be assessed and a novel domain general theory as a unifying explanatory concept for surrogate decisions