Toward a psychology of surrogate decision-making

Many of the decisions that we make in everyday life are made for the benefit of other people. However, research suggests that people often make decisions on behalf of other people that are different from those that the other person would choose for himself or herself. This raises practical problems in the case of legally designated surrogate decision-makers who may not meet the legal normative benchmark— the substituted judgment standard. We review evidence from ourown and other studies of surrogate decision-making and examinehow closely surrogate decision-making matches the recipient’swishes, or if it is an incomplete or distorted application of our own decision-making processes. To date there exists no domain general model of decision-making on behalf of other people. On the basis of the evidence that we review we propose a framework by which surrogate decision-making can be assessed and a novel domain general theory as a unifying explanatory model of the surrogate decision-making process.