Duc Nguyen Humanities and Social Science
The Role of Compassion in Decision-Making
Decision-making is a core aspect of the human experience, yet the mechanism underlying this process has not yet been fully understood, despite a long history of research in this field. There are many factors that play important roles in decision-making, such as outcomes, risk (probability of undesired outcomes), emotions, and interpersonal context. Early studies tended to focus on the effect of one specific factor on the process of decision-making, and disregarded others. Because of these studies, we have some understanding of how these factors affect decision-making. However, decisions in life are not so simple that one factor can determine everything. Thus, recent studies have shifted to focusing on the effects of multiple factors on decision-making. For my project, I will investigate the effect of compassion on decision-making in interpersonal contexts, in which the consequences faced by others depend on the decision-makers choice. Therefore, my study acts as a novel study, as well as a test of whether or not older studies’ findings agree with each other.