What is a Decision, Really? [Reference Article]
A Felt Sense of Closure or Commitment
Note: “Reference Articles” are more technical and provide nuanced detail on concepts that would disrupt the flow if I had to explain them every time. They are also evolving documents and may include half-baked ideas or notes for future development.
I define a “decision” as a felt sense of closure or commitment.
However, in the long history of decision-making literature, a decision is mostly treated as a cognitive act of choosing among alternatives (Simon, 1959/Hastie & Dawes, 2010).
Drucker and colleagues famously framed decisions as “a commitment of present resources to an uncertain and unknown future” (2004). While both of these definitions are accounted for in my model, neither are quite what I’m trying to point at.
In my definition, the term “felt sense” really matters here because the definition is about the experiential mechanics—what happens inside one’s body or mind—not about the formal logic or the allocation of resources.
I think a “decision” is best understood (generally) as the internal event (individual or collective) where a tension becomes settled enough to be felt as settled—either because the tension is resolved and exploration stops (closure), or because the tension is resolved by making some form of commitment for the future, or both.
Context
A few points of context.
First, as my approach is generally searching for below-the-surface meaning structures (i.e. “grammar”), I was looking for a definition of “decision” that would account for literally every other definition that has been or reasonably could be provided. The nuance is that I am not advocating for policing terminology—people can and should call things whatever they want to call them—but for a way to help resolve differences of terminology and interpretation but getting at the conceptual substratum underneath the phenomena.
Second, in almost all cases, whenever we are talking about “decisions” or “decision-making,” we are usually talking about deliberative decisions. Deliberative decisions are conscious, effortful, or intentional. They typically involve weighing options or alternatives and reasoning about their consequences. Non-deliberative decisions on the other hand are automatic, instinctual, and often unconscious. They are driven by habits, emotions, reflexes, and internalized norms (you can read more about this distinction here). Importantly, my definition of a decision spans both deliberative and non-deliberative decision-making.
Third, my methodological criteria for a good definition is pragmatic; i.e. “Is this definition useful?” In other words, I’m offering what Carnap (1950) would call a different explication—taking a concept already in wide informal use and sharpening it for different theoretical purposes. However, I’m still exploring the applications of this definition and what, if anything, should be reconsidered.
What is Closure?
Closure is the felt sense that the matter, issue, or tension is no longer live. For an individual, this is felt in the body/mind as a sense of release and relaxation. For a collective, it shows up as a shift in the gravity of the shared meaning-making or communicative field, evidenced usually by a shift in topic or coordinated action.
Closure is when options collapse, search ends, attention releases and returns. This can be strong or weak. Strong closure feels like “we’re done with this” — revisiting it would be surprising or costly, and reopening the question feels like it requires crossing a threshold, like new and relevant information or a context shift. Weak closure is closer to “good enough, moving on,” where the question is dropped without much friction. You notice a sound, turn your head, conclude it’s nothing, and your attention returns to what you were doing.
That is a decision in the broad sense because an inquiry that was open becomes closed, even if no sense of future obligation is created.
What is Commitment?
Commitment is the felt sense of being anchored to a course—of being held, however loosely, to some normative expectation. It resolves tension not by dropping the question, but by giving us a direction that holds us.
This can also be strong or weak. Strong commitment looks like a promise, a value-based stance, or a clear “we will.” Weak commitment can be as small as “I should call John on the way home,” where you feel oriented enough to stop deliberating, even though the normative pull is more like a lightly held intention.
Critically, commitment can occur without full closure: you can feel bound to show up to your kid’s practice while continuing to mentally reopen the possibility that an urgent work call might force you to skip it.
Why Both?
The reason the definition needs both terms is that tension can settle in recognizably different ways. Sometimes the tension resolves because you stop caring—the question drops, attention moves on. That’s closure.
Sometimes the tension resolves because you anchor to a course—the question may or may not drop, but you now have a direction that holds you. That’s commitment.
And in many cases, both happen together—you anchor to a course and the question drops—which is why they so often feel the same from the inside: the tension resolved.
If we define decisions only by commitment, we miss cases like a soldier entering battle while still questioning whether it’s the right move—clearly decided, clearly committed, but without the closure that would settle the matter internally.
If we define decisions only by closure, we miss cases where the felt settlement is real in the moment but only because the question has been delegated to the future.
Part of the reason for making this distinction is that it honors the real constraints under which decisions are actually made. Decisions don’t require both closure and commitment to be real decisions—they can involve one, the other, or both, and recognizing that is what makes the definition useful.
Conclusion
Most definitions of “decision,” both academically and day-to-day, conflate both vectors: something closes and something binds. But while that combined pattern may be the familiar “I decided” experience, analytically, even a low-level instance of only one vector still qualifies as a decision.
Keeping the vectors separable is useful as a descriptive map: it lets you distinguish “we are done discussing this” from “we are now held to this,” without implying that having only one is a failure or a problem.
The impact and utility of this definition is yet to be determined, but given how much investment goes into “decision-making,” I suspect it could be substantial.