To address response style or bias in rating scales, forced-choice items are often used to request that respondents rank their attitudes or preferences among a limited set of options. The rating scales used by raters to render judgments on ratees' performance also contribute to rater bias or errors; consequently, forced-choice items have recently…

Although choosing a high school major is often adolescents' first significant career decision, little is known about the factors that enable adolescents to choose a high school major autonomously (i.e., a major that reflects their values and preferences) or the familial and individual constellations that affect this decision. The current study…

It is commonly assumed that memories contribute to value-based decisions. Nevertheless, most theories of value-based decision-making do not account for memory influences on choice. Recently, new interest has emerged in the interactions between these two fundamental processes, mainly using reinforcement-based paradigms. Here, we aimed to study the…

Subject selection is one of the key components in the new college entrance examination system. This study analyzed the data from a sample survey of college entrance examination participants in Zhejiang Province between 2017 and 2020 using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, cross analysis, and binary logistic regression in an effort to…

This small-scale study aims to explore acceptance and preference dilemmas in choosing playmates with physical disability of typically developing 6-8-year-old Cypriot children. Eighteen participants were interviewed individually in a simple process involving scenarios and questions with the use of images of hypothetical peers with and without…

In this paper I investigate undergraduate students' discrete location choices in presence of a plethora of potential destinations and psychic costs. I demonstrate how enrolment into institutions of tertiary education is influenced by personality and social preferences. More importantly, these individual traits are found to affect the valuation of…

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

Research shows that college students choose majors for a variety of reasons. Some students are motivated by potential economic returns, others want to take engaging classes, and others still would like opportunities to help people in their jobs. But how do these preferences map onto students' actual major choices? This question is particularly…

Purpose/Objectives: This study assessed guardians' influencers and motivators for purchasing school lunch meals for their children; determined motivators for the decision to purchase using constructs of the Self-Determination Theory (SDT); and assessed relationships between influencers to purchase a school lunch meal, body mass index (BMI) of the…

Objective: This study aims at investigating the relationship between agility performance and perception and decision-making mechanisms of female basketball players. Materials and Methods: A total of seventeen elite female basketball player playing in Second League in Turkey Basketball Federation participated in this study voluntarily. The mean age…

Causal sequences can be segmented into cause and effect. However, some argue causal relations in discourse are by default in "effect-cause" order. Others claim "cause-effect" order is easier to process and the default way of expressing causality, due to iconicity. We conducted experiments testing participants' production…

Past research has shown that young monolingual children exhibit language-based social biases: they prefer native language to foreign language speakers. The current research investigated how children's language preferences are influenced by their own bilingualism and by a speaker's bilingualism. Monolingual and bilingual 4- to 6-year-olds heard…

Women are underrepresented in physics. Because of the structure of the Japanese educational system, more women must choose physics as a subject for university entrance exams to increase the number of women studying advanced physics at university. In this study, we investigated the factors influencing girls' choice of physics for university…

The Cognitive Style Indicator (CoSI) includes 3 cognitive dimensions: creating (flexible, open-ended and inventive), knowing (emphasizing facts, details, objectivity, and rationality), and planning (guided by preferences for certainty and well-structured information). The first aim of this research was to validate the 3-factor structure of the…

This dissertation consists of two separate essays on major choice in higher education. In the first chapter, I investigate how differences in information affect students' major choices over time. Since college has such a short time horizon, the amount of information students have before coming in may play a big role in how well they are matched to…