Beliefs about real life decision strategies

• What kind of behavior is seen as most adaptive for everyday decision makers? How do they invest their mental energy? Is it in complex information integration, which traditionally is considered rational, or in other cognitive procedures? With these underlying questions 25 subjects were encouraged to give written accounts of their decision strategies in real life. The instructions promoted sequential descriptions without being too obtrusive. All reports were contents analyzed and condensed to six reflective and six intuitive categories with contrasting qualities. These indicated that the subjects had good analytic intentions, but rarely employed any demanding strategies and were almost unaware of the possibility of using different integration rules. The subjects rather preferred other sorts of deliberation, in areas like strategic planning, social adjustment, value co-ordination, and assessment calibration. Several of these activities were focused on evaluative phenomena and quite often prepared for systematic restructuring of values, criterion levels, and attribute weights to simplify the process. A strong regulating factor was the intuitive influence from emotions, established principles, identity concepts, and wishful thinking. It is concluded that the relative priority of evaluative phenomena has certain advantages for the individual. The strategy is probably easier to understand and to justify. It has a more natural relation to fundamental needs, identity aspects, social ties, etc. Finally, it is in direct contact with the individual?s emotional life and thus a connecting bridge between analysis and intuition.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Decision making

beliefs

everyday strategies

analytic reasoning

intuition

decision rules

cognitive effort

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

rap (ämneskategori)