Excellent. Recording in progress, understood? All right. Okay, I think this is very peculiar

for Germany, again, that if you would go to any German railway station bookshop, which

you might do when you're waiting for a belated train again. However, if you go to a railway

bookshop, you are guaranteed to find one or two or dozens of magazines or books that deal with

decisions. How to decide good, decide between always favorite topic between head and gut, like here,

and so on. And it is no coincidence that the advice literature of how to decide correctly,

rational and good on this subject is legion. We are used to understand decisions as more or less

rational acts of choice that are omnipresent and unavoidable in our everyday lives.

On the basis of an intentional action model, action and decision-making are somehow equated.

Accordingly to this idea, every action is based on an inner decision, and this is why

this genre of advice literature is always so relevant, because if our whole day is full of

decisions, we somehow have to deal with it. This means decisions are taken for granted.

They are always there. We cannot circumvent them. We are always

exposed to the situation where we have to make a decision.

This idea primarily comes from some sort of social, but also very much from economic sciences.

They are helping us to understand decisions as something that is taken for granted. Do not

think about it. Just try to make good decisions. As I said, acting and deciding are equated. Some

scholars try to count how many decisions we make, and then we have some varying suggestions. One

neurobiologist has counted 20,000 decisions we make every day. Others come to 35,000

whatsoever. These numbers are sometimes traded in economics. The narratives that come from

the economics have a large share in the fact that modern and Western societies

see themselves as decision-making societies. They would define themselves as decision-making

societies, as the Bremen sociologist Uwe Schiemann has put it. Inevitable basic operations

only maybe distorted by various... that these, what I would call the decision sciences,

are concerned with is how do we arrive at good and meaning, rational, economically advantageous

decisions? How is that possible? To reflect upon the point that a decision is a social construction,

something that varies between cultures and historical circumstances, is rarely taken or

sometimes never taken into account. I can leave it at that, and you can have a look at it already.

Against this prevailing understanding of decision-making as an anthropological constant,

something that we have from the Stone Age to the year 20,022, against this understanding

a position can be argued that breaks with many supposed self-evident truths about decision-making.

To formulate a counter position, one can say decision-making is not the rule but the total

exception. Sometimes, months and years can pass without making a real decision.

Because decision-making is much more time-consuming than non-decision-making.

Decision-making has to do with the commitment to one of several alternatives, and this leads to the

field of contingency where human beings feel usually quite awkward when something is possible

but necessary for a decision-making process. So, the decision-making is not a decision-making

that is possible but necessary. This is a problem. Decision-making is burdensome. We want to avoid it

and is always criticisable. Why did you do it, and why did you do this, and not the other thing?

In short, decision-making is a total imposition. It is therefore in need to explain and not take it

for granted when, what, how, and by whom decisions were made. In addition, action is often attributed

the quality of decisions only in retrospect. Retrospect decision-making, retrospect sense-making.

So, only if we build some narratives, something appears as a decision that the actors would not

have considered as such. It therefore appears as a social construct, not only from the scientists,

but also we, as normal everyday people, are all the time constructing decisions. When we look back

and say, this was a decision, I took a decision, I decided to study at Erlang and not at Freiburg.

And about this social construct, different questions can be asked, different from those

that are usually dealt with in the so-called decision sciences. So, instead of asking how

rational, how just, how moral, justifiable these decisions were, we can also ask, what is,

in a special situation, considered as decision-making? What do people think? What is it?