Undoubtedly, human behaviors are dynamic, evolving, interactive, and an adaptive process. These complex processes have a common denominator resulting from a common mechanism. Human behavior mechanism has been summarized into eight basic hypotheses by the Yu20. The findings, as well as, observations of psychology and neural science have been the bases for this summarization. These eight hypotheses can explain almost all human behaviors. Let us briefly state five aspects of the dynamics of behavior mechanisms as follows.
These five aspects continuously interact with each other, resulting in infinite wonderful human behavior patterns. (i) Experience, learning and memory are the basis for interpreting and judging arriving events. (ii) The dynamics of unfavorable discrepancies, between the ideal goal states (or equilibriums) and the perceived states, create the dynamic change of charge structure, which commands attention allocation and prompts actions, passively or actively. (The charge, a kind of mental force, is a precursor to drive or stress).
(iii) A fundamental element in the human information processing is the dynamic attention allocation, by which, most significance is given by the events at any given point in time. (iv) Active problem solving and avoidance justification have been included in the way of release of charged by the human beings, which has been referred as the least resistance principle. (v) The ideal goals are achieved and maintained by the human beings with the help of necessary external information. However, processing of external information is not done in the situations of paid attention.
The above dynamics of human behavior which is self-explanatory, the human brain is the internal information-processing center, which receives all kinds of information from various sources. Since everyone consciously or subconsciously has a set of goals, after receiving external information, he/she will evaluate and compare the ideal goal states and the perceived states. The unfavorable discrepancies between the ideal goal states and the perceived states then create the change of charges, which will command attention allocation to prompt actions to the events perceived as most significant (measured in terms of charges).
(V 2006) Note that the information that has a great influence on our charge structure will more easily obtain our attention allocation, which in turn will change our charge structure. An important role has been played by external information in the process of human information due to the need of the information for the achievement and maintenance of ideal goals in the lives of the human beings. In order to reach the ideal or equilibrium of goals, human beings continuously seek and interpret external information.
Thus, if people have the feeling of having too much information, which uses up too much of their time, then they may feel stressed and in turn affect their decision-making. (Lawrence 1999) In order to facilitate the discussion, we will start with the known concept of habitual domains and show, in the next sections, how they affect our decision-making in the IT era. Each person has a unique set of behaviors resulting from his or her ways of thinking, memory, judging, responding, and handling problems, which gradually stabilized within a certain domain over a period of time.
This collection of ways of thinking, memory, judging, etc. together with its organization, interaction and dynamics, is called our habitual domain (HD). Indeed, our HD is our mental software, which drives our brain (a super computer) to think and act. Our HD goes wherever we go and have great impact on our decision-making. There are four elements of habitual domains: (i) Potential domain (PDt). This is the collection of all thoughts, concepts, ideas, and actions that can be potentially activated by one person or by one organization at time t.
(ii) Actual domain (ADt). This is the collection of all thoughts, concepts, ideas, and actions, which actually occur at time t. (iii) Activation Probability (APt). This represents the probability that the ideas, concepts and actions in the potential domain that can be actually activated, (iv) Reachable domain (RDt). This is the collection of thoughts, concept, ideas, actions and operators that can be generated from initial actual domains. At any point in time habitual domains (HDt) will mean the collection of the above four subsets.