Deciding can often be hard; there are so many possibilities. What do I want for dinner, or what movie do I want to see? Making a decision can be even more difficult when there are high emotional or financial stakes. Whom do I want to marry? What is the best house or career? Even in marriage, housing, or careers, however, there is usually a finite number of options and a reasonable amount of information about them. How challenging is it, then, when the stakes are huge, the information confusing, the deadlines short, and the outcomes momentous, such as when a law enforcement officer is determining which suspect to arrest, a company is considering a new product, or, even worse, a government is trying to decide whether to go to war?

There are four interrelated aspects of decision making that are particularly troublesome: the uncertainty of the current situation, the unpleasant fact that from time to time there are surprises, the strong possibility that someone is trying to deceive, and the imponderable future.

Uncertainty

One of the main reasons why decisions are so hard to make is the nature of the situation in which choices are made. This is especially the case in the three areas in which intelligence analysis is most widely used: national security, law enforcement, and business. For even a simple decision, the environment can be complex, shifting, and uncertain. There is so much information to consider and so little time to deal with it.