Scientific Modeling “From the Outside In”

Scientific Modeling “From the Outside In”
The human decision-making process may well be one of the most complicated systematic phenomena in the universe. In terms of the point of view of the scientific observer, it is certainly unique. On the one hand, a scientist trying to model this process is like an anatomist in the days before anesthesia and vivisection—scientists can observe and to some extent even control external influences on a system, and can observe the resulting behavior of the system as a whole, but they cannot
“get inside” to observe its constituent parts at work. On the other hand, every scientist is a human decision maker with powers of self-consciousness and self-reflection. However, self-reflection of our deci-sion-making processes has not produced that much more “hard science”
than has, say, self-reflection of our breathing or digestive processes.
While advances in neuroscience may ultimately do for decision theory what vivisection did for anatomy, decision theory currently remains very much a “black box” science. Although decision theorists can (and do) use introspection to suggest theories and hypotheses, the rigorous science consists of specifying mutually observable independent
variables (in particular, the objects of choice available for selection),
mutually observable dependent variables (the selected alternative), and refutable hypotheses linking the two. In other words, choice theory attempts to explain why particular alternatives are selected from a set of available choices.