Social Structure in Naturalistic Decision Making

Motivation – While much of the early NDM research emphasized technical proficiency, more recently, NDM research has begun to investigate cognition in social contexts. As a result, we argue that NDM research can benefit from stronger theoretical linkages with social theories and the concept of social structure, which has arguably been the central concept in sociological investigation. Research approach – This is a theoretical paper. Originality/Value – We build theory of how institutional, relational and embodied concepts of social structure can be used to as an analytical lens to provide rich descriptions of NDM type socio-cognitive interaction. Take away message – Ontological clarity regarding the relationship between NDM and social structure allows NDM research to better position itself in relation to objectivist and subjectivists stereotypes and to utilize various structuration theories to address sociocognitive interaction. This contributes to our understanding of interactions between NDM type cognitive powers, and institutional and relational structures.