Developing more representative decision-making models with behavioral geography

Keywords: behavioral geography, decision making, rationality, representation
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

A number of recent articles have lamented the effective demise of the sub-discipline of behavioral geography due to an inability to reconcile theoretical challenges. Advances from parallel fields of inquiry, most notably judgment and decision making, have filled in many of the gaps that early behavioral geographers wrestled with, outlining a path forward for the study of decision making within geography. In the following article we describe different interpretations of the historical and present role of behavioral geography within the discipline and discuss how it might be reoriented to facilitate a more representative study of decision making within Geography. We make two suggestions towards this end. The first is to deal more realistically with decision making under uncertainty, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary field of judgment and decision making, rather than the unrealistic assumptions about behavior that currently predominate. The second is to focus more on the decision context: including how social norms, institutions, and the physical environmental influence decision making. And relatedly, to embrace heterogeneity among decision makers, acknowledging the importance of cultural values in decision making and the ways in which decision models are not representative of marginalized groups.