The Origins of Judgment and Decision-Making in Childhood

People make decisions across myriad domains of life. Since the 1950s, judgment and decision-making (JDM) research shows that people systematically deviate from rational and beneficial decision-making. Despite this rich history of empirical work, the field has largely overlooked the roots of strategic decision-making and of judgment errors. To fill this gap, we introduce a focus on the origins of judgment and decision-making in childhood (OJDM) that has the unique advantage of placing to the forefront questions surrounding the (1) conceptual antecedents involved in effective decision-making; (2) origins of JDM behaviors; (3) early trajectory of JDM concepts; (4) legitimacy of longstanding JDM assumptions; and (5) scope of interventions as behaviors develop in real-time. OJDM offers a blueprint for an emerging area of research, one that organizes existing work, identifies critical gaps, and provides a generative structure for building theory, challenging long-standing philosophies, and diversifying methods. OJDM also pushes the field to reimagine JDM research in proposing that childhood is central (not supplemental) to understanding judgment and decision-making and that JDM is fundamentally limited in its empirical, theoretical, and philosophical output without a necessary developmental lens focusing on childhood. A developmentally informed perspective is essential for providing a comprehensive understanding of the origins of human decision-making. Such an interdisciplinary program can generate new knowledge at the intersection of social psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and developmental science.