Intuition and analysis in decision making

Through four studies of decision making in the context of crisis management, this dissertation aims to contribute to theory and research on intuitive and analytic decision processes, with new insight into how cognitive style, cognitive processing, decision behavior and task performance variables are interconnected. To support this research, we have developed a crisis management simulation that provides the experimental task environment, and a self-report instrument for measuring intuitive and analytic processing across five distinct sub-dimensions (three intuitive and two analytic). The first article in this dissertation is a theoretical overview of the field of intuition research related to crisis management. The second article examines the predictive power of intuitive and analytic cognitive styles with regard to task performance in a crisis management simulation. The third article is an extension and a response to a potential criticism of the previous – that researchers often measure style instead of actual processing as if they were the same phenomenon. The fourth article extends the previous ones by examining whether intuitive and analytic cognitive styles have indirect (mediation) effects on task performance through actual intuitive and analytic processing in decision making.