Good Decision-makers May Be Made, Not Born, Study Suggests

"Intelligence doesn't explain everything. Our results suggest that people with good decision-making skills obtain better real-life outcomes, even after controlling for cognitive ability, socio-economic status and other factors," said Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a researcher in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon and the lead author of the study. "That is good news, because decision-making skills may be taught."

The study recruited 360 people with diverse backgrounds. Each completed seven tasks measuring "Adult Decision-Making Competence," or their ability to avoid common decision-making errors. For example, a good decision-maker should be able to make choices independent of how information is presented, or framed. Imagine that you are learning about a type of medication that is 99 percent effective, for instance. You should be equally likely to use it if it is described as 1 percent ineffective.

Study participants also completed a survey with questions about controllable life experiences that might reflect poor decision-making. They were asked, among other things, whether they had ever spent a night in jail; been unfaithful to a romantic partner; bounced a check; been arrested for driving under the influence; had a romantic relationship that lasted for more than a year; and been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. As it turned out, those who reported the greatest number of negative controllable life experiences fared the worst on the decision-making tasks.

The authors cautioned that this study does not definitively prove that good decision-making skills lead to better life outcomes. The direction of causality has not yet been examined. It could be that the stress of difficult life experiences erodes decision-making skills. Further research could examine whether a person's life experiences improve after they have received decision-making training.

The study is being published in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and will be presented May 25 at the Association for Psychological Science's annual convention in Washington, D.C.

The paper was co-authored by Andrew Parker, an associate behavioral scientist with the RAND Corp., and Baruch Fischhoff, the Howard Heinz University Professor of Social and Decision Sciences and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon.

To take a short version (15 minutes) of the test and find out how well you score compared to other participants, visit http://sds.hss.cmu.edu/risk/decision.html.