Every day we make thousands of decisions. Trivial decisions like what to have for breakfast and what to wear to work are decided rapidly without much thought. Decisions with more significant consequences take longer. For example, in critical incidents the complex decisions faced by the emergency services need to be made quickly and have little margin for error.

Current research can help decision makers avoid misleading biases, being paralysed by the choices available, or failing to get information out to the people who need it.

As Julie Gore and her colleagues show us in this issue, there is a rich history of research on decision making. We feature some of the latest examples, including decision-making processes in cyber security, decision making under stress and terrorist decision making. As always, this latest issue of CREST Security Review is available to download, read and share.

Inside this issue:

• Nikki Power looks at decision making during emergencies, and how the blue-light services work together.
• Drawing on research in the same field, Laurence Alison, Michael Humann and Sara Waring highlight the importance of communicating with victims and casualties.
• Emma Barrett and Nathan Smith give us some factors to help us assess a group’s decision-making capability under extreme stress.
• Simon Ruda shows us how small manipulations can change the decisions made by large numbers of people.
• Awais Rashid and Sylvain Frey investigate cyber security decision-making processes.
• Paul Gill explains the eight things we need to know about terrorist decision making.
• Jan-Willem Bullée looks at how we can be manipulated into making bad decisions.
• Julie Gore talks about the Naturalistic Decision Making community and the rich history of research on this topic.
• Renate Guerts shows us why professionals are needed to assess risks of violence.

Each issue of CREST Security Review also features articles outside of its special focus. In this issue we include research on spotting smugglers as well as what lessons we can take from Northern Ireland to help our understanding of engagement in violent extremism.

About CREST Security Review

CREST Security Review is a quarterly magazine produced by the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). It provides a gateway to the very best knowledge and expertise on understanding, mitigating and countering security threats, providing research-based answers to real-world problems.

Each issue includes articles focused on a particular topic; past issues include Information Elicitation, Cyber Security, Transmission, After Islamic State and Networking. You can read all the issues for free here.