It was a pleasure to speak recently about my work in deception and magic with Laura Militello and Brian Moon, hosts of the Naturalistic Decision Making Podcast.
Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) involves the study of how people make decisions in complex real-world settings that usually include dynamic, uncertain and continually changing conditions, and often require real-time decisions in urgent situations with significant consequences for mistakes.
The field of NDM has evolved a set of frameworks and tools that are extremely helpful for studying, understanding, designing, and countering deception. These include methods for Cognitive Task Analysis to understand how people make sense of the world and generate action; the Recognition Primed Decision model that explains how people use their experience to make decisions; and the Data-Frame Theory of Sensemaking that helps explain the mechanisms underpinning pattern recognition. See also my paper on Making Sense of Magic, in which I use the Data-Frame theory to explain how deceptive strategies within a magic effect manipulate a spectator’s sensemaking activities.
The podcast episode is available here.