Strategies, Heuristics, and Adaptive Decision Making: New Evidence from an Individual Differences and Process Tracing Approach

People do not always behave rationally. To a significant extent, this results from our limited psychological capacities and knowledge, our bounded rationality. Yet some individuals do seem to make consistently better decisionsthey better approximate normative models, are more likely to avoid judgment biases, and more effectively adapt to a variety of cognitive demands (Frederick, 2005; Stanovich & West, 2002). Theoretically, causes of these advantages include stable individual differences in basic cognitive abilities and capacities. However, considerable evidence casts doubts on purely innate and fixed capacity interpretations of cognitive abilities (Ericsson & Kinstch, 1995; Cokely, Andersson, & Ericsson, 2006). Moreover, research suggests that in basic laboratory tasks, advantages predicted by cognitive ability measures (e.g. working memory capacity) result, at least in part, from strategic control and heuristic processes (Cokely, Kelley, and Gilchrist, 2006). What are the implications of differences in strategic cognitive control processes for models of judgment under uncertainty? What are the mechanisms (e.g. strategies, heuristics) that give rise to efficient and adaptive judgment and decision-making?