Decision Making at Berkeley

While surfing the web looking for an article on decision making for this blog I happened upon the Career Services page from Berkeley University. The site is located at: http://career.berkeley.edu/Plan/MakeDecisions.stm. The page/site has broke decision making down into three basic areas: 1) Factors influencing the individual’s decisions, 2) Decision making styles, and 3) a Take Action: Decision Making Models section. The purpose of the site is to assist students in picking a career path.

The site describes three factors that affect our decisions. These factors include:
1. Information Factors
2. Decision-Making Experience
3. Personal Factors

Additional information is available on each of the previously listed factors via a link located on the site.

The site goes on to inform the reader that individual decisions will depend on the decision-making style and the importance associated with the outcome of the decision, indicating that different decision styles will generate different outcomes. The site recommends a planned decision-making style (a structured decision making process). This would indicate that the university considers all of its students to be novice decision makers.

The University of Berkeley site goes on to list three different styles of structured decision making processes: a Pros & Cons model, an Analytical Decision-Making Worksheet model, and an Imaginative-Visualization Experience model. The Pros and Cons model is an un-weighted decision making model as opposed to the Analytical Decision-Making Worksheet which does weight the various factors. Either of these two models would be ideal for the novice decision maker. The Imaginative-Visualization Experience model has the decision maker trying to imagine and experience the possible outcome of their decisions internally. This last model would most likely be utilized by an experienced decision maker. In addition each of these decision styles has time constraints associated with their use. Most college students will face the critical issue of time availability directly affecting the choice of their decisions based upon the limits in the amount of time that can be used to research a topic and the type of decision model that will be chosen.

I found that the site provided an interesting look into basic decision making models and a rudimentary version of a decision support system. The site is aimed at its student body and therefore largely inexperienced decision makers. The site isn’t designed so much as to help a student make a decision, but on what a student should look at when making a decision. As an example the site does not provide any drill down capabilities for helping a student pick a major or a career path.