A descriptive approach to the dynamics of choice behavior

To one interested in how an individual chooses among alternative courses of action, the motley array of theories of choice behavior must seem bewildering. Questions of very different sorts may be raised about the act of choice, and these give rise to quite different kinds of investigations. Does one wish to know more about how choice ought to be made? Or does one's interest lie in explaining behavior in terms of models representing observed choices as the result of postulated mental or neurophysiological events? What about the prediction of choice, the relating of decision probabilities to behavioral correlates and to observed independent variables? Does learning play a central role in choice behavior? Presented here is an attempt to organize several relevant viewpoints in terms of the kinds of questions they try to answer and to point toward a path of simplification.