Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People face consequential personal decisions throughout their lives. Immigrating to another country or separating froma life-partner are but two examples. How do individuals make such notoriously difficult decisions? Can they make themrationally? We posit that answering both these questions requires understanding a decisions transformative potential, ac-cording to which decisions range in (1) their perceived temporal impact (half-life), (2) the extent to which the decisionmaker can know whether a choice will generally make them better or worse off (valence uncertainty), and (3) the perceivedlikelihood of a decision to change the decision maker (personal change). We propose that under the conditions of incom-plete information that decisions with high transformative potential inevitably entail, people may make them by recruitingtheir social and cultural environment and by relying on heuristics. These conditions also render bounded rationality prin-ciples (e.g., satisficing) a more plausible rationality benchmark than maximizing expected utilities.