In an experimental study we investigated effects of information amount and legal training on the judgment accuracy in legal cases. In a two (legal training: yes vs. no) x two (information amount: high vs. low) between-subjects design, 90 participants judged the premeditation of a perpetrator in...

Brandstätter, Gigerenzer and Hertwig (2006) put forward the priority heuristic (PH) as a fast and frugal heuristic for decisions under risk. According to the PH, individuals do not make trade-offs between gains and probabilities, as proposed by expected utility models such as cumulative...

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. We argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information...

It has been shown that in decision making evaluations of evidence and attributes are modified. In three studies it was investigated if this finding of coherence shifts generalizes to real-world probabilistic inference decisions which are made from given probabilistic cues. Using a...

Jury members do not normally have the privilege of a complete, unbiased picture of the case. To make the best of patently incomplete evidence, they cannot but at least partially rely on their intuition. We provide evidence for this claim based on self-report data as well as more subtle measures...

In recent years, numerous studies comparing intuition and deliberation have been published. However, until now relatively little is known about the cognitive processes underlying the two decision modes. Therefore, we analyzed processes of information search and integration using eye-tracking...

We analyse two team settings in which one member in a team has stronger incentives to contribute than the others. If contributions constitute a sacrifice for the strong player, the other team members are more inclined to cooperate than if contributions are strictly dominant for the strong player.

Many everyday decisions have to be made under risk and can be interpreted as choices between gambles with different outcomes that are realized with specific probabilities. The underlying cognitive processes were investigated by testing six sets of hypotheses concerning choices, decision times,...

Three studies sought to investigate decision strategies in memory-based decisions and to test the predictions of the parallel constraint satisfaction (PCS) model for decision making (Glöckner & Betsch, 2008). Time pressure was manipulated and the model was compared against simple heuristics...

Broken Windows: the metaphor has changed New York and Los Angeles. Yet it is far from undisputed whether the broken windows policy was causal for reducing crime. In a series of lab experiments we show that first impressions are indeed causal for cooperativeness in three different institutional...