Individual Differences in Decision‐making Competence

Abstract

Throughout their lives, people make decisions about their health, finances, and environmental impacts. Research on decision-making competence examines the decision-making skills people need to improve their real-world decisions and to obtain better life decision outcomes (Bruine de Bruin, Parker, & Fischhoff, 2007; Parker & Fischhoff, 2005). If critical decision-making skills can be improved through teaching and decision support, this research ultimately brings the promise of designing interventions that improve the outcomes of people's decisions and, hence, their overall quality of life. In addition to having practical implications, research on decision-making competence contributes important theoretical and methodological insights to the field of judgment and decision-making. Theoretically, research on decision-making competence improves our understanding of the cognitive and non-cognitive processes that shape people's ability to make decisions, as well as their development throughout the lifespan (for reviews, see Bruine de Bruin, Parker, & Fischhoff, 2011; Finucane & Lees, 2005; Peters & Bruine de Bruin, in press; Peters, Hess, Auman, & Vastfjall, 2007). Methodologically, research on decision-making competence aims to improve the reliability of commonly studied judgment and decisionmaking tasks, seen in consistent performance across decision problems, as well as their validity, seen in relationships to obtaining better life decision outcomes. Moreover, it stimulates the use of more sophisticated data analysis methods, in particular, model comparison techniques (e.g., Tomlinson, Marewski, & Dougherty, 2011). Despite its potential promise, the topic of individual differences in decision-making competence has received relatively little attention in the field of judgment and decision-making. Possibly, this scarcity is due to researchers having traditionally focused on identifying decision-making biases, and on the situational conditions rather than the individual differences that contribute to these biases. Furthermore, studying individual differences often requires access to diverse populations that vary in their decision-making competence and life experiences, and the means to recruit samples that are large enough to provide statistical power. Moreover, validating individual-differences measures poses the challenge of identifying objective criterion variables that provide unambiguous evidence of good decision-making (Finucane & Lees, 2005; see also Stanovich & West, 2000). Possibly, researchers have also been discouraged by studies on individual differences in decision-making styles, which have identified few stable personal characteristics that consistently affect decision-making across tasks and contexts (Appelt, Milch, Handgraaf & Weber, 2011). Yet, the few studies that have examined individual differences in decision-making competence have shown the feasibility of overcoming these challenges (Appelbaum & Grisso, 1988; Del Missier, Mantyla & Bruine de Bruin, 2011; Finucane et al., 2002; Finucane & Guillon, 2010; Finucane & Lees, 2005; Finucane, Mertz, Slovic, & Schmidt, 2005; Parker & Fischhoff, 2005; Smith, Shanteau, & Johnson, 2004), with recent work introducing valid and reliable instruments targeting various age groups (Bruine de Bruin et al., 2007; Finucane & Guillon, 2010; Parker & Fischhoff, 2005). This special issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision-Making aims to swell interest in decision-making competence through the presentation of novel research efforts.