Abstract

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 our
own and other studies of surrogate decision-making and examine
how closely surrogate decision-making matches the recipient’s
wishes, 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.