The Effect of Rational and Intuitive Decision-Making Strategies on the Quality of Interest Forecasts

Abstract

The world of work has changed. To keep up, vocational psychologists have adopted a greater emphasis on career adaptability, which relies on possessing transferable skills that will remain useful regardless of job context. Adaptable clients successfully translate idiosyncratic interests into transferable skills by taking advantage of certain occupational and educational opportunities. In order to do so, clients must choose among the myriad options available in the information age. What influences these choices and how they may be optimized are questions of primary interest to vocational psychologists. Decision-making theories and methodologies from the areas of cognitive and social psychology have been applied to career adaptability through the Anti-introspectivist approach and Trilateral Model of adaptive career decision-making, which postulate both intuitive and rational systems are necessary for adaptability. One-hundred forty participants chose among a variety of tasks after either an unconscious-intuitive, conscious-rational, or decision-as-usual information processing manipulation. Interest levels were assessed at three time points, before, during, and after engaging in the chosen task in order to determine which decision strategy produced more effective results. Level of occupational engagement and decision-making styles were also considered as potential moderators. Overall, previous levels of occupational engagement were found to be related to decisional quality, but this finding was pronounced only for the control group. Results suggest that decisions made after being immersed in decision-relevant stimuli and a period of unconscious thought were marginally more effective than decisions made as usual. These decisions were also more likely to be recalled accurately two weeks later. The results imply that career decision-makers and counselors may be better served by emphasizing experiential engagement with available options over a decisional strategy that relies simply on "thinking through" the decision.