Real-Life Decision Making in College Students II: Do Individual Differences Show Reliable Effects?

First-year undergraduates participated in a short-term longitudinal study of real-life decision making over their first 14 months of college. They were surveyed about 7 different decisions: choosing courses for upcoming terms (on 3 different occasions), choosing an academic major (twice), planning for the upcoming summer, and planning for sophomore-year housing. They also completed a survey of self-reported decision-making styles and the Need for Cognition survey (Cacioppo and Petty, 1982) to assess their focus on rationality and enjoyment of analytic thinking. Results showed few statistically significant correlations between stylistic measures and behavioral measures of decision making, in either the amount of information considered or the way in which the information integration tracked predictions of linear models of decision making applied to each participant’s data. However, there were consistent correlations, across the 7 decisions, between stylistic measures and affective reactions to, or retrospective descriptions of, episodes of decision making. We suggest that decision-making styles instruments may better reflect the construction of narratives of self as a decision maker more than they do actual behavior during decision making.