Socioeconomic Decision-Making: the Family

We move on now from decision-making by the individual, acting on his, or her, own, to decision-making by individuals acting within groups, sometimes small, but often also large. Much of the earlier analysis of individual behaviour remains crucial to an understanding of how these groups behave. Individual needs remain. Indeed, the principal reason individuals join groups is to enable them to satisfy more fully many of their needs, such as those for safety, belonging, status and self-actualisation. The environmental influences we looked at in Chapter 4 also impinge strongly on group behaviour. The nature of decision-making, however, now changes in a number of important respects. First, instead of there being only one individual’s goals, all members of a group are likely to have goals, and certain of these goals may conflict. Some goals may be specific, but others will be of a more general nature. Sometimes, too, there will be joint goals, and responsibility for implementing these will have to be apportioned. There is here scope for differences of opinion, and some system of conflict resolution is therefore central to group behaviour.