decision-making

A serious behavioural failure may be uncommon within a person’s history yet become the principal basis for judgments of character and future risk. This conceptual article develops the conjunctive misfortune problem: adverse conditions, culpable action, stochastic harm, categorical institutional responses, and persistent collateral consequences can combine to generate sharply divergent life course…

A new study by neuroscientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows how the brain encodes information throughout the decision-making process to keep options clearly in mind and to ensure that chosen and unchosen options are remembered.

What can neuroscience tell us about our complicated relationship with social media? From reward and attention to algorithms, cognitive biases and the way our brains adapt to our digital habits, Sadali Wanniarachchi explores the science behind our scrolling.

The usual answer is "five to ten hours." It is not wrong, and it is not useful, because it never says what those hours are spent on — so people fill them with the easiest activity available, which is reading the company's About page a fourth time. The number is the wrong thing to ask about. Most of what makes you good in an interview is prepared once and reused for every interview after it. Once …

AI-augmented supply chains combine demand sensing, scenario simulation, and decision intelligence to help automotive organizations respond faster, optimize working capital, and build greater resilience. The post From Planning Cycles to Always-On Intelligence: How AI-augmented supply chains are transforming automotive resilience, profitability, and working capital appeared first on Capgemini .

Learn why patients delay medical treatment, including denial, present bias, learned helplessness, decision fatigue, cost, and healthcare friction.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit a critical failure mode when operating in underconstrained decision environments: Computational Decision Paralysis (CDP). This phenomenon is characterized by the inability to terminate deliberation among epistemically equivalent options, leading to combinatorial explosion and resource exhaustion. Drawing on Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis, we propose …

Learn a few surprising facts about procrastination — and helpful tools to overcome it — with this quiz. It's based on social scientist Itamar Shatz's new book, Solving Procrastination .

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…