Research on judgment and decision making typically studies "small worlds"-highly simplified and stylized tasks such as monetary gambles-among homogenous populations rather than big real-life decisions made by people around the globe. These transformative life decisions (e.g., whether or not to emigrate or flee a country, disclose one's sexual orientation, get divorced, or report a sexual assault) can shape lives. This article argues that rather than reducing such consequential decisions to fit small-world models, researchers need to analyze their real-world properties. Drawing on principles of bounded and ecological rationality, it proposes a framework that identifies five dimensions of transformative life decisions: conflicting cues, change of self, uncertain experiential value, irreversibility, and risk. The framework also specifies simple, versatile choice strategies that address these dimensions by, for instance, breaking down a decision into steps, avoiding trade-offs between present and future selves, or sampling others' experiences. Finally, it suggests benchmarks for assessing the rationality of transformative life decisions. Methodologically, this framework adapts a long tradition of mainly lab-based judgment and decision-making research to a text-based approach, thereby setting the stage for empirical work that analyzes real-world decisions using natural-language processing. Only by understanding decisions with the potential to transform life trajectories-and people in the process-will it be possible to develop encompassing and inclusive theories of human decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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人生最重要决定的心理学。


关于判断和决策的研究通常研究同质人群之间的“小世界”——高度简化和程式化的任务，例如金钱赌博——而不是全球人们在现实生活中做出的重大决策。这些变革性的生活决定（例如，是否移民或逃离一个国家、披露自己的性取向、离婚或报告性侵犯）可以塑造生活。本文认为，研究人员需要分析它们在现实世界中的特性，而不是减少这种后果性决策以适应小世界模型。借鉴有限理性和生态理性原则，它提出了一个框架，确定了变革性生活决策的五个维度：冲突的线索、自我的改变、不确定的体验价值、不可逆性和风险。该框架还指定了简单、通用的选择策略来解决这些维度，例如，将决策分解为步骤，避免现在和未来自我之间的权衡，或对他人的经验进行采样。最后，它提出了评估变革性生活决策合理性的基准。在方法论上，该框架将主要基于实验室的判断和决策研究的悠久传统适应为基于文本的方法，从而为使用自然语言处理分析现实世界决策的实证工作奠定了基础。只有通过理解有可能改变生活轨迹的决策——以及在此过程中的人——才有可能发展出包罗万象和包容性的人类决策理论。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。