Abstract:Behavioral decision research investigates how people make judgments and choices. Driven by the mission of promoting and improving our understanding of human decision behavior, research in this area attempts to describe people’s decision process and facilitate better decision making. Researchers in this field have long been concerned with fundamental questions of human rationality, and have been attuned to the distinction between “how a rational agent ought to behave”，as characterized by normative theory, and “how people actually behave”，as characterized by descriptive theory. Over the past several decades, this field has offered profound insights into normative decision theory, counterintuitive findings in heuristics and biases studies, and practical prescriptions in empirical areas ranging from medicine to finance to business. This paper reviews the position of behavioral decision research in psychology and the development of Chinese decision-making research. As a field traditionally characterized by its equal attention to theoretical and practical research, certain topics should be addressed in the future, i.e., neuroeconomics; interactions between cognition and emotion in decision making; individual, social, and contextual influences on lifespan decision making; and cultural difference in decision making. Moreover, more efforts should be made to translate laboratory research to the real-world policy arena.