ACCENTUATE THE RELEVANT

People need information in order to make effective choices and to feel competent in managing their own affairs. Decision-making research pro vides tools for identifying and addressing these informational needs. The tools allow formal analyses of what information is critical to par ticular decisions, as well as descriptive analyses of how well those f acts are understood. Communication should be focused on critical infor mation that is either missing or available but not understood. Decisio n-relevant situations range from ones posing well-formulated, imminent choices to ones in which people are trying to understand what choices are even possible. This article reviews briefly the formal and descri ptive approaches to dealing with such decisions. Including these appro aches in behavioral interventions might help people to be as systemati c as they would like in their decision making. It might even make them want to be more systematic.