"Narrative Thinking and Decision Making"

My friend Julianne pointed out the website for this monograph by Lee Roy Beach. Beach writes in the Abstract:

Cognitive narratives are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our experience. They provide continuity between the past and present and allow us to make plausible forecasts about what the future will be if we do not intervene to change it. Decision making is the act of evaluating the desirability of the forecasted future and, when it falls short of our values and preferences, choosing appropriate interventions to ensure that the actual future is more desirable than the forecasted future. In short, decision making is the process through which we manage the development of our narratives and, in doing so, manage the progress of our lives.

He goes on in the long Abstract to build a strawman, the rational economic man of some aspects of Economics, against which to contrast his model of decision making in the context of narrative thinking. In so doing, he ignores a lot of modern economic thought and the literature on decision making in organizations.

Still, the idea of decision making as responsive to narrative is I think very interesting. It suggests concern on the individual's decision making with respect to a private narrative as well as concern for group decision making based on the groups socially constructed narrative.

The monography can be downloaded from the site in a PDF file.

Thanks to Julianne!