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Decision-Making Styles and Decision Outcomes

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Brain, Decision Making and Mental Health

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Summary

Decision-making styles are a set of ingrained habits that an individual exhibits when faced with a decision situation and have been investigated in relation to a variety of psychological and behavioral variables. This chapter looks at the associations between these styles and the broad category of real-life decision outcomes. It firstly presents the main approaches to decision-making styles and their categorizations and subsequently discusses the domain of decision quality and criteria for its evaluation. The overall pattern of the explored relationships between decision-making styles and decision outcomes is similar in objective and subjective outcomes as well as in mental health. The rational and intuitive styles generally appear more advantageous, while the avoidant style is the most disadvantageous one. The discussion of probable mechanisms over the “style-outcome ” relationships focuses on cognitive and motivational aspects. These are together with the call for a more unifying and more complex approach also emphasized in the challenges for the future research.

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Decision-making styles and Decision outcomes.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This classification is based on the model of career decision-making by Harren [4] with the decision-making style as a factor affecting progress in the decision-making process; only the rational, intuitive and dependent style included.

  2. 2.

    World Health Organization (2014).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under contract No. APVV-15-0662 and by the Scientific grant agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic and of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (VEGA 1/0748/19).

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  1. Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, Košice, Moyzesova 9, 040 01, Kosice, Slovakia

    Jozef Bavolar

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    Nima Rezaei

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Bavolar, J. (2023). Decision-Making Styles and Decision Outcomes. In: Rezaei, N. (eds) Brain, Decision Making and Mental Health. Integrated Science, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15959-6_22

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