omain-specific preferences for intuition and deliberation n decision making

There is evidence for reliable individual differences in the tendency to use an intuitive (i.e., spontaneous, affect-based) and a deliberative (i.e., effortful, planned, and analytic) decision mode. Even though other individual characteristics in decision making (e.g., risk attitude) seem to be domain-specific, it is commonly assumed that a person’s decision style is relatively stable across decision domains. Using a domain-specific extension of the Unified Scale to Assess Individual Differences in Intuition and Deliberation (USID), we found that preference for intuition and preference for deliberation showed considerable variability across domains (e.g., choosing a dress vs. choosing a doctor). In addition, domain-specific preecision style xpertise ndividual differences omain specificity ferences for intuition were consistently correlated with self-rated expertise in making decisions in the respective domain. Our results indicate that a person’s domain-general decision style does not necessarily generalize across decision domains, and that the domain-specificity of preferences for intuition seems to be driven partly by differences in expertise. © 2015 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ company. A common assumption in research on decision styles is that they are “chronic” (Betsch, 2008, p. 231) and thus characterize a . Introduction A popular distinction in psychology is between intuitive and eliberate mental processes. Intuitive processes are characterized s “effortless, implicit, . and often emotionally charged” (e.g., ahneman, 2003, p. 698). Deliberate processes are more effortul, explicit, and consciously controlled. The distinction between ntuition and deliberation seems phenomenologically supported, nd it has also entered psychological theorizing. Several influenial psychological frameworks on human thinking and reasoning ssume a dual-process structure of the mind, where an intuitive, utomatic system operates alongside a deliberate, controlled one e.g., Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Epstein, 2008; Hammond, 1996; ahneman, 2011; Mukherjee, 2010; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich & est, 2000; for a critical discussion, see Gore & Sadler-Smith, 2011; ruglanski & Gigerenzer, 2011). The frameworks acknowledge that oth mental systems – though qualitatively distinct – jointly influnce behavior. It has been argued that there are systematic individual diferences in the tendency to rely on intuitive and deliberative We thank Susannah Goss for editing the manuscript. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel. : +0049 0 30 82406335. E-mail address: pachur@mpib-berlin.mpg. de (T. Pachur). ttp://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.jarmac. 2015.07. 006 211-3681/© 2015 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Published by reativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). by-nc-nd/4.0/). decision mechanisms (for an overview, see Betsch & Iannello, 2010). Some people have a strong inclination to make decisions based on intuition; others tend toward deliberation. Such individual differences in what we refer to as decision style2 are also relevant in organizational contexts (Dane & Pratt, 2007). For instance, entrepreneurs have been found to have a better balance between intuitive and deliberate decision modes than actors or accountants (who lean more toward an intuitive or analytic style, respectively; Groves, Vance, Mendez, & Choi, 2008). Further, the fit between a manager’s decision style and the institution’s organizational structure has been shown to impact manager satisfaction, intention to exit, and actual exit (Brigham, DeCastro, & Shepherd, 2007). Finally, Khatri and Ng (2000) found that senior executives’ decision styles were associated with the performance of their 2 Importantly, people’s tendencies to rely on deliberation and intuition are often construed as orthogonal dimensions, and also empirically the two are only weakly, if at all linked (e.g., Hodgkinson & Sadler-Smith, 2003). Therefore, a person’s decision style does not represent a preference of one decision mode (e.g., intuition) over the other (e.g., deliberation), but expresses the strength of a person’s tendency to rely on the respective decision mode. Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://