Impaired decision behavior has been repeatedly observed in schizophrenia patients. We investigated several cognitive mechanisms that might contribute to the jumping-to-conclusions bias (JTC) seen in schizophrenia patients: biases in information-gathering, information weighting and integration,...

Recently it has been observed that different choices can be made about structurally identical risky decisions depending on whether information about outcomes and their probabilities is learned by description or from experience. Current evidence is equivocal with respect to whether this choice...

Third-party punishment has recently received attention as an explanation for human altruism. Feelings of anger in response to norm violations are assumed to motivate third-party sanctions, yet there is only sparse and indirect support for this idea. We investigated the impact of both anger and...

We investigated how frequency and amount of punishment affect the decision making of Iranian subjects. In our first experiment, performing a computer-based Persian version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), our subjects scored remarkably lower than their Western counterparts. Moreover, our...

According to Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT: Dijksterhuis \& Nordgren, 2006), complex decisions are best made after a period of distraction assumed to elicit ``unconscious thought''. Over three studies, respectively offering a conceptual, an identical and a methodologically improved replication...

Knowing what event precipitated a client's abnormal behaviors makes the client appear more normal than if the event is not known (Meehl, 1973). Does such knowledge also influence judgments of the need for psychological treatment, and if so, does it matter whether the precipitating event was...

Judgments of naturalness of foods tend to be more influenced by the process history of a food, rather than its actual constituents. Two types of processing of a ``natural'' food are to add something or to remove something. We report in this study, based on a large random sample of individuals...

Five studies demonstrated that people selectively use general moral principles to rationalize preferred moral conclusions. In Studies 1a and 1b, college students and community respondents were presented with variations on a traditional moral scenario that asked whether it was permissible to...

The deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflecting on the alternatives. This effect has been explained (e.g., Dijksterhuis,...

When there are multiple competing objectives in a decision-making process, Multi-Attribute Choice scoring models are excellent tools, permitting the incorporation of both subjective and objective attributes. However, their accuracy depends upon the subjective techniques used to construct the...