The internal validity of self-report measures for intuitive and rational decision making

Besides the different methods to measure the application of deliberate and intuitive processes in specific situations and under different context factors discussed in the previous chapters of this volume, the general tendency to use more intuitive or deliberate processing might be considered a trait (or state) variable which is connected with the person and to a certain extent stable over time. In this line of thought during the last three decades various measures for assessing preferences for either intuitive or rational decisionmaking styles have been proposed. In this chapter we will focus on the internal validity of four such instruments: Harren’s (1979) Decision Making Styles questionnaire (DMS), the General Decision Making Style inventory (GDMS) of Scott and Bruce (1995), the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI) of Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj and Heier (1996) and an instrument measuring the Preference for Intuition or Deliberation (PID) developed by Betsch (2004, 2008).