Redundant deliberation about negative consequences: Decision inertia in emergency responders.

Major emergencies are high-stakes, ambiguous, dynamic, and stressful events. Emergency response commanders rely on their expertise and training to mitigate these factors and implement action. The Critical Decision Method was used to interview 31 commanders from the police (n = 12), fire and rescue (n = 15), and ambulance services (n = 4) in the United Kingdom about challenges to decision making. Transcripts were analyzed in 2 ways: (a) using thematic analyses to categorize the challenges to incident command and (b) grounded theory to develop a theoretical understanding of how challenges influenced decision processing. There were 9 core challenges to incident command, themed into 2 categories: (a) those relating to the perceived characteristics of the incident itself; and (b) those relating to uncertainties about (inter)personal dynamics of the team(s) responding. Consideration of challenges featured prominently in decision makers ’ prospective modeling, especially when thinking about goal accomplishment (i.e., What if I deploy now? What if I do not?). Commanders were motivated to save life (attack/approach goal), yet also sought to prevent harm (defend/avoid goal). Challenges led commanders to redundantly deliberate about what to do; their prospective modeling was related to the anticipation of potential negative consequences that might arise both for acting (attack) and not acting (defend). Commanders identified this difficult trade-off, yet described how experience and th...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - Category: Medical Law Authors: Source Type: research