Measuring individual differences in intuitive and deliberate decision-making styles: A comparison of different measures

Recent findings reveal that individuals differ in their inclination to intuitive and deliberate decision styles. In general, people with an intuitive style rely more on feelings to make decisions and solve problems holistically; they habitually make decisions in a fast, effortless and automatic way. People characterised by a deliberative style prefer to solve problems and make decisions by using analytical techniques. They tend to make slower, elaborated and planned decisions. An increasing number of inventories has been published that claim to measure individual differences in intuition and/or deliberation. This chapter gives an overview of five of the most common inventories: REI, PID, GDMS, CoSI, and PMPI. We review findings obtained with these scales which, in line with their different theoretical foundations, substantiate the assumption that what is measured by the different scales seems to cover different aspects of a common label ‘intuition’. This idea is complemented by results of a factor analysis including all scale means. The content validity of the scales will also be discussed. We will finally suggest a heuristic to decide when to use which scale