## The Idea in Brief Recognition-Primed Decision Making (RPD) is a model that explains how people make effective decisions under pressure without systematically comparing all possible options. Developed by psychologist Gary Klein in the 1980s, it shows that experts draw on experience to quickly recognise familiar patterns, generate a workable course of action, and mentally test it before committing. RPD combines intuition and analysis, making it especially useful in high-stakes, time-critical environments such as firefighting, aviation, medicine, and the military. --- ## Key Concepts ### 1. Origins and Context - Developed from Klein’s field studies of firefighters, who often had to act without time for deliberate analysis. - The model challenged traditional “rational choice” views of decision making, which assumed that people consciously weigh multiple options. ### 2. The Core Process - **Recognition**: Experienced individuals identify a situation as familiar and recall how they or others have handled it before. - **First Option Generation**: Instead of creating a menu of options, they settle on the first “good enough” action. - **Mental Simulation**: They run a quick internal test — imagining how events will unfold if they follow this option. - **Action**: If the mental simulation suggests it will work, they act; if not, they adjust or try the next plausible action. ### 3. Three Variants of RPD Klein described three types of recognition: 1. **Simple Match** – The situation is straightforward and the correct action is immediately obvious. 2. **Diagnosis** – The situation is unclear, requiring sense-making before recognising a pattern. 3. **Evaluation** – Multiple actions are mentally simulated to see which is feasible. ### 4. Expertise and Intuition - RPD relies heavily on experience; novices cannot use it effectively because they lack patterns to draw from. - Intuition here is not guesswork, but the rapid retrieval of tacit knowledge built over years of practice. ### 5. Comparison with Rational Models - Rational choice models assume time, complete information, and systematic evaluation of alternatives. - RPD emphasises speed, satisficing (finding a workable solution, not necessarily the optimal one), and adaptability.