In this article, we provide a brief overview of research on decision making and cancer. This research illuminates how people make such high-stakes decisions and how to help people make decisions that improve their physical and mental health. However, research has shown that cancer decisions are not so simple. If treatments are equivalent in prolonging life, then choose the one that maximizes quality of life (e.g., has fewer side effects).

Finally, research on interventions to support better decision making in clinical settings is reviewed, drawing out implications for future research on decision making and cancer.ĭecision making about cancer-especially about cancer treatments-might seem to be a simple matter: choose the option that prolongs life most. In contrast to the earlier emphasis on rote use of numerical detail, modern approaches emphasize understanding the bottom-line gist of options (which encompasses emotion and other influences on meaning) and retrieving relevant social and moral values to apply to those gist representations. Theoretical approaches to decision making that explain cognition, emotion, and their interaction are described, including classical psychophysical approaches, dual-process approaches that focus on conflicts between emotion versus cognition (or reason), and modern integrative approaches such as fuzzy-trace theory.

We discuss challenges to achieving informed and shared decision making, including cognitive limitations and emotional factors, but argue that understanding the mechanisms of decision making offers hope for improving decision support. We review decision-making along the cancer continuum in the contemporary context of informed and shared decision making, in which patients are encouraged to take a more active role in their health care.

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