Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a process model of decision making mediated by goals and relationships. The model is implemented in the V O T E computer program which simulates Congressional roll call voting. In this paper, we focus on VOTE's decision strategies, which are based on the need not only to arrive at a vote, but also to produce an explanation for each decision. W e describe severed typical strategies, as well as an indirect strategy, Deeper Analysis, that is invoked when the normal strategies fail to arrive at a decision.