The downside to this, at least as the media frames it, is that you can be washed into the ocean by “freak waves”. With this in mind, and with a goal to reduce drowning deaths among rock fishers, the Australian government made a decision to mandate life jackets for rock fishers.

Luckily, a team —  Peter Kamstra, Brian Cook, Eveline Rijksen, and Shane Daw — decided to investigate and analyze what was going on using a Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) approach [1].  NDM is a way of studying how people make decisions in the real world —  in contrast to lab-based studies which examine one specific aspect of decision making, usually using toy problems and non-experts in the domain (i.e. student volunteers).

What Kamstra et al. discovered is that mandating life jackets was unlikely to help reduce