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The Role of Imagination in Decision‐Making
Author(s) -
Nanay Bence
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/mila.12097
Subject(s) - outcome (game theory) , psychology , action (physics) , mechanism (biology) , social psychology , epistemology , empirical research , cognitive psychology , philosophy , economics , physics , mathematical economics , quantum mechanics
The psychological mechanism of decision‐making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief‐desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro‐attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in conflict with this picture. My aim is to outline an alternative model that is consistent with these empirical findings. This alternative model emphasizes the role imagination plays in our decisions: when we decide between two possible actions, we imagine ourselves in the situation that we imagine to be the outcome of these two actions and then compare these two imaginings.