decision-making

Your willingness to sacrifice immediate joy for long-term rewards isn't just a personality trait. New research shows that living in a society where it’s easy to make new friends boosts your optimism and willingness to delay happiness.

Slow breathing with a prolonged exhale made people more willing to take risks by changing heart activity and increasing the brain’s sensitivity to rewards. The findings suggest that something as simple as controlling your breath can directly influence how you evaluate choices.

IntroductionMagic, understood as a set of effects designed to produce experiences of impossibility, offers a distinctive methodological potential for cognitive science because it makes it possible to manipulate, with ecological validity, processes such as attention, perception, reasoning, and memory. Despite increasing research interest over the last two decades, the available evidence has not be…

Why do some people keep pursuing difficult goals while others give up? Psychology uncovers the mindsets that power persistence, resilience, and the killer instinct.

It may seem like having lots of choices is all positive, but research indicates that this is not the case. How can you lessen the negative impact of an overload of choices?

Sabine Doebel is featured in Fast Company discussing the psychology of delayed gratification and how strategically using rewards can help people stay focused on long-term goals. The article explores how delaying immediate rewards can support productivity, self-control, and goal achievement.

People with alcohol use disorder experience automatic emotional reactions to alcohol-related images that disrupt their decision-making processes. New research shows the brain attempts to offset these cognitive disruptions by increasing activity in regions associated with deliberate thought.

Explore the psychology of becoming independent in college, from self-regulation and emotional autonomy to identity, decision-making, and growth.

Attention shapes what we notice, how we interpret situations, and which options we see. By practicing attention, we can improve our judgment and make more intentional decisions.

The dominant tradition in decision science rests on a foundational presupposition: humans are autonomous agents whose decision-making requires principally an account of how choices are evaluated and selected. This paper challenges a more primitive assumption — that agency is reliably present to evaluate anything at all. Drawing on convergent indirect evidence from behavioral economics, motivation…

As big data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become embedded in the governance of higher education, algorithmic decision-making has improved managerial efficiency but has also led teachers to question the fairness of evaluation and to face difficulties in psychological adaptation, making job burnout an increasingly salient concern. How perceived fairness of algorithmic decision-makin…

Envy plays a greater role when resources are allocated through majority voting than when we make decisions individually. This is shown by new research from Linkoping University, Sweden.

A neuroscientist is challenging the idea that the brain contains a central system that actually “makes” our decisions. What we experience as choosing may instead emerge from the continuous interaction of perception, movement, the body, and the world around us.

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 24 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02544-y Vloeberghs et al. show that variability in confidence reflects trial-to-trial fluctuations in the decision criterion.

Around 20% of adults procrastinate regularly. Yet a lot of what we hear about this common behaviour is wrong.

Emojis are ubiquitous in digital communication, and brands widely integrate them into social media marketing. Drawing on research on cognitive busyness, multitasking, and the Affect Infusion Model, we propose that emojis function as context-dependent affective cues rather than uniformly processed signals. Across two studies, we examine how cognitive busyness shapes their impact on brand evaluatio…

Female Cope's gray treefrogs became slower, less accurate and more likely to defer a choice as recorded mate calls increased from two to eight, even when researchers separated the number of options from chorus noise.

Why do simple tasks sit on our to-do lists for weeks? Personality may help explain why we procrastinate and why starting small can help.

If chess can sharpen our minds, could it also change how we make decisions, handle mistakes, and respond when our plans fall apart spectacularly?

The brain has a remarkably flexible system for handling uncertainty and changing situations. Researchers found that the frontoparietal cortex constantly shifts how it communicates with other brain regions depending on what information is needed to make a decision. Rather than simply becoming more active when things get difficult, this network appears to reorganize itself in real time.