So far in this book we have seen that except for the area of
vocational choice, behavioral counseling researchers generally
have not bothered to develop a technology for helping clients
improve the quality of their personal decision making. But
behaviorists do not shoulder the blame alone. The other major
counseling theories either ignore the topic of decision making
or address it imperfectly. We have also seen that although the
languages of behavioral counseling and classical decision theory
permit a moderate degree of cross-referencing, much research in
the latter held is irrelevant or inapplicable to counseling.
Fortunately, however, the recent emergence of cognitive
behaviorism, the evolution of new perspectives in decision
theory, and the presence of pertinent work in the amorphous
problem-solving literature all hold promise for the development
of a technology to help clients resolve problems of choice. In
this chapter I plan to lay the foundation for an operational
model of decision-making counseling. T