ERRORS IN PLANNING AND DECISION-MAKING AND THE NATURE OF HUMAN INFORMATION-PROCESSING

This article deals with human action regulation when controlling very complex systems. ''Action regulation'' means the interaction of goal elaboration, forecasting activities, hypothesis formation, planning, decision making, and self reflection. Typical errors and mistakes in human planning and decision making are reported and related to characteristics of the human information processing system. It is demonstrated that a lot of very different errors and mistakes are based on a few characteristics of the human mind. Additionally we demonstrate that it is in no way simple to avoid these mistakes, as these information processing characteristics of the human mind are otherwise quite functional in a number of contexts.