Decision

Decision is a multidisciplinary research journal focused on a theoretical understanding of neural, cognitive, social, and economic aspects of human judgment and decision-making behavior.

Decision publishes articles on all areas related to judgment and decision-making research including probabilistic inference, prediction, evaluation, choice, decisions under risk or uncertainty, and economic games. The journal publishes articles that present new theory or new empirical research addressing theoretical issues or both.

To achieve this goal, Decision publishes three types of articles: long articles that make major theoretical contributions, shorter articles that make major empirical contributions addressing important theoretical issues, and brief review articles that target rapidly rising theoretical trends or new theoretical topics in decision making.

Disclaimer: APA and the editors of Decision assume no responsibility for statements and opinions advanced by the authors of its articles.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion

Decision supports equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in its practices. More information on these initiatives is available under EDI Efforts.

Editor’s Choice

One article from each issue of Decision will be highlighted as an “Editor’s Choice” article. Selection is based on the recommendations of the associate editors, the paper’s potential impact to the field, the distinction of expanding the contributors to, or the focus of, the science, or its discussion of an important future direction for science. Editor’s Choice articles are featured alongside articles from other APA published journals in a bi-weekly newsletter and are temporarily made freely available to newsletter subscribers.

Author and editor spotlights

Explore journal highlights: free article summaries, editor interviews and editorials, journal awards, mentorship opportunities, and more.

Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.

Submission

To submit to the editorial office of Tim Rakow, PhD, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal, in Microsoft Word (.docx) or LaTex (.tex) as a zip file with an accompanied Portable Document Format (.pdf) of a manuscript file.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7 th edition. Manuscripts may be copyedited for bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7 th edition are available.

Tim Rakow
King's College London
Email

Manuscript types

Decision will publish three types of articles. All page limits are exclusive of tables, figures, and references:

• full length articles (35 pages) that make major theoretical contributions
• shorter articles (15 pages) that make major empirical contributions addressing important theoretical issues
• brief review articles (15 pages) that target rapidly rising theoretical trends or new theoretical topics in decision making

Masked/Unmasked review

Upon selecting an article type, authors can also choose between masked or unmasked review (i.e., “Unmasked article” or “Article with Masked review requested”).

Equity, diversity, and inclusion in Decision

Decision is committed to improving equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in scientific research, in line with the APA Publishing EDI framework and APA’s trio of 2021 resolutions to address systemic racism in psychology.

The journal encourages submissions which extend beyond Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples (Henrich, et al., 2010), and study designs that address heterogeneity within diverse samples.
To promote a more equitable research and publication process, Decision has adopted the following standards for inclusive research reporting.

Author contribution statements using CRediT

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) stipulates that "authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study." In the spirit of transparency and openness, Decision has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to a manuscript.

Submitting authors must identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to the CRediT taxonomy. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the CRediT designations will be published as an author contributions statement in the author note of the final article. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before submission.

Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author. Not all roles will be applicable to a particular scholarly work.

Participant description, sample justification, and informed consent

Authors are encouraged to include a detailed description of the study participants in the method section of each empirical report, including (but not limited to) age, sex, gender, and any other demographic information potentially relevant to the paper.

In both the abstract and in the discussion section of the manuscript, authors are encouraged to discuss the diversity of their study samples and the generalizability of their findings (see also the constraints on generality section below).

The method section also must include a statement describing how informed consent was obtained from the participants (or their parents/guardians), including for secondary use of data if applicable, and indicate that the study was conducted in compliance with an appropriate Internal Review Board.

Constraints on generality

In a subsection of the discussion titled "Constraints on generality," authors should include a detailed discussion of the limits on generality (see Simons, Shoda, & Lindsay, 2017). In this section, authors should detail grounds for concluding why the results are may or may not be specific to the characteristics of the participants. They should address limits on generality not only for participants but for materials, procedures, and context. Authors should also specify which methods they think could be varied without affecting the result and which should remain constant.

Openness and transparency

Decision encourages both methodological and data transparency to ensure the reproducibility of research results. Thus, we ask authors to ensure their manuscripts meet certain standards aligned with the open science movement.

Data, materials, and code

Authors must state whether data and study materials are available and, if so, where to access them. Recommended repositories include APA’s repository on the Open Science Framework (OSF), or authors can access a full list of other recommended repositories.

In both the author note and at the end of the method section, specify whether and where the data and material will be available or note the legal or ethical reasons for not doing so. For submissions with quantitative or simulation analytic methods, state whether the study analysis code is available, and, if so, where to access it (or the legal or ethical reason why it is not available).

• All data have been made publicly available at the [repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].
• Materials and analysis code for this study are not available.
• The code behind this analysis/simulation has been made publicly available at the [repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].

Registered Reports

The journal also invites submission of Registered Reports. Registered Reports require a two-stage review process.

Stage 1 is the submission of the registration, so-called Stage 1 manuscript. This is a partial manuscript that includes introduction, theoretical framework, rationale for the study, hypotheses, experimental design, and methods (including an analysis plan). The partial manuscript will be reviewed for significance, theoretical framework, methodological approach, and analysis plan.

If the Stage 1 Registered Report manuscript receives an “in-principal acceptance (IPA)” it means that the study has the potential to be published if it is performed exactly as proposed (also including the proposed statistical evaluation) regardless of the outcome of the study. After this stage and before data collection begins the study is pre-registered (e.g., through the Registered Report tools from OSF).

In Stage 2, the full paper undergoes a second peer-review process, checking if the study protocol was implemented and if the reasons for potential changes were acceptable. Nevertheless, a rejection is still possible, namely if the study’s execution and analysis diverged too much from the proposed study design and/or the manuscript is low quality. The refinement of the discussion and conclusions may still require further revision, but the process will be expedited.

Registered Adversarial Collaborations

The journal also invites submission of Registered Adversarial Collaborations. These are a sub-type of Registered Reports in which two researchers (or research teams) with different positions on a scientific matter agree to collaborate on the design, data collection, analysis, and reporting of jointly-conducted research. The purpose of this research is to provide some resolution on the point(s) of difference. The rationale for adversarial collaboration is that this will often be a more constructive approach to resolving scientific disputes than researchers pursuing independent lines of research. To this end, the researchers may propose multiple studies for their Registered Adversarial Collaboration (e.g., studies having different methodologies, studies each addressing a separate point of difference).

Registered Adversarial Collaborations also require a two-stage review process.

Stage 1 is the same as for a standard Registered Report, except that:

1. The partial manuscript includes details of the competing theoretical positions of the researchers and is explicit on how the study methods allow for resolution on the point(s) of difference.
2. The researchers submit a Writing Plan that outlines the plan for producing the final manuscript (e.g., whether an independent ‘referee’ will oversee the writing, what proportion of the Discussion is given over to interpretations of the data that are written jointly or independently by the two researchers).

Stage 2 is the same as for a standard Registered Report.

Manuscript preparation

Review APA's Journal Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submitting your article.

Formatting

Double-space all copy. Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Additional guidance on APA Style is available on the APA Style website.

Below are additional instructions regarding the preparation of display equations, computer code, and tables.

Display equations

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

• Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.
• Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Computer code

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.

In online supplemental material

We request that runnable source code be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit Supplementing Your Article With Online Material.

In the text of the article

If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Tables

Use Word's insert table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.

LaTex files

LaTex files (.tex) should be uploaded with all other files such as BibTeX Generated Bibliography File (.bbl) or Bibliography Document (.bib) together in a compressed ZIP file folder for the manuscript submission process. In addition, a Portable Document Format (.pdf) of the manuscript file must be uploaded for the peer-review process.

Academic writing and English language editing services

Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors.

Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service.

Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.

Submitting supplemental materials

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the PsycArticles ® database. Please see Supplementing Your Article With Online Material for more details.

Abstract and keywords

All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases.

References

List references in alphabetical order. Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed in the references section.

Examples of basic reference formats:

Journal article

McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review, 126(1), 1–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126

Authored book

Brown, L. S. (2018). Feminist therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000092-000

Chapter in an edited book

Balsam, K. F., Martell, C. R., Jones. K. P., & Safren, S. A. (2019). Affirmative cognitive behavior therapy with sexual and gender minority people. In G. Y. Iwamasa & P. A. Hays (Eds.), Culturally responsive cognitive behavior therapy: Practice and supervision (2nd ed., pp. 287–314). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000119-012

Figures

Preferred formats for graphics files are TIFF and JPG, and preferred format for vector-based files is EPS. Graphics downloaded or saved from web pages are not acceptable for publication. Multipanel figures (i.e., figures with parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.) should be assembled into one file. When possible, please place symbol legends below the figure instead of to the side.

Resolution

• All color line art and halftones: 300 DPI
• Black and white line tone and gray halftone images: 600 DPI

Line weights

• Adobe Photoshop images
  • Color (RGB, CMYK) images: 2 pixels
  • Grayscale images: 4 pixels
  • Stroke weight: 0.5 points

  APA offers authors the option to publish their figures online in color without the costs associated with print publication of color figures.

  The same caption will appear on both the online (color) and print (black and white) versions. To ensure that the figure can be understood in both formats, authors should add alternative wording (e.g., “the red (dark gray) bars represent”) as needed.

  For authors who prefer their figures to be published in color both in print and online, original color figures can be printed in color at the editor's and publisher's discretion provided the author agrees to pay:

  • $900 for one figure
  • An additional $600 for the second figure
  • An additional $450 for each subsequent figure

  Permissions

  Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

  On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

  Open science badges

  Articles are eligible for open science badges recognizing publicly available data, materials, and/or preregistration plans and analyses. These badges are awarded on a self-disclosure basis.

  At submission, authors must confirm that criteria have been fulfilled in a signed badge disclosure form (PDF, 33KB) that must be submitted as supplemental material. If all criteria are met as confirmed by the editor, the form will then be published with the article as supplemental material.

  Authors should also note their eligibility for the badge(s) in the cover letter.

  For all badges, items must be made available on an open-access repository with a persistent identifier in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent. For the preregistered badge, this is an institutional registration system.

  Data and materials must be made available under an open license allowing others to copy, share, and use the data, with attribution and copyright as applicable.

  Available badges are:

  

  Open Data:
  All data necessary to reproduce the reported results that are digitally shareable are made publicly available. Information necessary for replication (e.g., codebooks or metadata) must be included.

  

  Open Data: Protected Access:
  A "PA" (Protected Access) notation may be added to open data badges if sensitive, personal data are available only from an approved third-party repository that manages access to data to qualified researchers through a documented process. To be eligible for an open data badge with such a notation, the repository must publicly describe the steps necessary to obtain the data and detailed data documentation (e.g. variable names and allowed values) must be made available publicly. Manuscripts with data deposited in ICPSR's database are eligible for this badge.

  

  Open Materials:
  All materials necessary to reproduce the reported results that are digitally shareable, along with descriptions of non-digital materials necessary for replication, are made publicly available.

  

  Preregistered:
  At least one study's design has been preregistered with descriptions of (a) the research design and study materials, including the planned sample size; (b) the motivating research question or hypothesis; (c) the outcome variable(s); and (d) the predictor variables, including controls, covariates, and independent variables. Results must be fully disclosed. As long as they are distinguished from other results in the article, results from analyses that were not preregistered may be reported in the article.

  

  Preregistered+Analysis Plan:
  At least one study's design has been preregistered along with an analysis plan for the research — and results are recorded according to that plan.

  Note that it may not be possible to preregister a study or to share data and materials. Applying for open science badges is optional.

  Publication policies

  For full details on publication policies, including use of Artificial Intelligence tools, please see APA Publishing Policies.

  APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications.

  APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).

  In light of changing patterns of scientific knowledge dissemination, APA requires authors to provide information on prior dissemination of the data and narrative interpretations of the data/research appearing in the manuscript (e.g., if some or all were presented at a conference or meeting, posted on a listserv, shared on a website, including academic social networks like ResearchGate, etc.). This information (2–4 sentences) must be provided as part of the author note.

  Ethical Principles

  It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish "as original data, data that have been previously published" (Standard 8.13).

  In addition, APA Ethical Principles specify that "after research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release" (Standard 8.14).

  APA expects authors to adhere to these standards. Specifically, APA expects authors to have their data available throughout the editorial review process and for at least 5 years after the date of publication.

  Authors are required to state in writing that they have complied with APA ethical standards in the treatment of their sample, human or animal, or to describe the details of treatment.

  The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on its website in HTML, PDF, and Word format. You may also request a copy by emailing or calling the APA Ethics Office (202-336-5930). You may also read "Ethical Principles," December 1992, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, pp. 1597–1611.

  Other information

  See APA’s Publishing Policies page for more information on publication policies, including information on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors, author name changes after publication, the use of generative artificial intelligence, funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures, duplicate publication, data publication and reuse, and preprints.

  Visit the Journals Publishing Resource Center for more resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing in APA journals.

  Editorial Board

  Incoming (2025) editor

  (handling all new submissions in 2024)

  Tim Rakow, PhD
  King’s College London, United Kingdom

  Incoming (2025) consulting editors

  Edward Cokely, PhD
  University of Oklahoma, United States

  Susann Fiedler, PhD
  Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria

  Adam Harris, PhD
  University College London, United Kingdom

  Marie Juanchich, PhD
  University of Essex, United Kingdom

  Natalia Karelaia, PhD
  INSEAD, France

  Lukasz Walasek, PhD
  University of Warwick, United Kingdom

  Outgoing editor

  (handling invited revisions only in 2024)

  David V. Budescu, PhD
  Fordham University, United States

  Outgoing associate editor

  Clintin P. Davis-Stober, PhD
  University of Missouri, United States

  Outgoing consulting editors

  Ali Abbas, PhD
  University of Southern California, United States

  Rachel Barkan, PhD
  Ben-Gurion University, Israel

  Yoella Bereby-Meyer, PhD
  Ben-Gurion University, Israel

  Sudeep Bhatia, PhD
  University of Pennsylvania, United States

  Stephen B. Broomell, PhD
  Purdue University, United States

  Colin Camerer, PhD
  California Institute of Technology, United States

  Wändi Bruine de Bruin, PhD
  University of Southern California, United States

  Jason Dana, PhD
  Yale University, United States

  Enrico Diecidue, PhD
  INSEAD, France

  Adele Diederich, PhD
  Oldenburg University, Germany

  Ido Erev, PhD
  Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

  Klaus Fiedler, PhD
  Heidelberg University, Germany

  Mirta Galesic, PhD
  Santa Fe Institute, United States

  Gerd Gigerenzer, PhD
  Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany

  Daniel G. Goldstein, PhD
  Microsoft Research, New York City, United States

  Cleotilde Gonzalez, PhD
  Carnegie Mellon University, United States

  Claudia Gonzalez-Vallejo, PhD
  Ohio University, United States

  Reid Hastie, PhD
  University of Chicago Booth School of Business, United States

  Ralph Hertwig, PhD
  Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany

  Joseph G. Johnson, PhD
  Miami University, United States

  Tamar Kugler, PhD
  University of Arizona, United States

  Michael D. Lee, PhD
  University of California, Irvine, United States

  Tomás Lejarraga, PhD
  Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain

  Boris Maciejovsky, PhD
  University of California, Riverside, United States

  David R. Mandel, PhD
  Defence Research and Development Canada, Canada

  Edgar Merkle, PhD
  University of Missouri, United States

  Ben R. Newell, PhD
  University of New South Wales, Australia

  Thorsten Pachur, PhD
  Technical University of Munich, Germany

  Timothy J. Pleskac, PhD
  Indiana University, United States

  Michel Regenwetter, PhD
  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, United States

  Valerie Reyna, PhD
  Cornell University, United States

  Benjamin Scheibehenne, PhD
  Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, German

  Michael Smithson, PhD
  Research School of Psychology, Australian National University, Australia

  Jack B. Soll, PhD
  Duke University, United States

  Neil Stewart, PhD
  Warwick Business School, United Kingdom

  Jennifer Trueblood, PhD
  Indiana University, United States

  Konstantinos Tsetsos, PhD
  University of Bristol, United Kingdom

  Brandon M. Turner, PhD
  Ohio State University, United States

  Thomas S. Wallsten, PhD
  University of Maryland, United States

  Peer review coordinator

  Kris Guin
  American Psychological Association

  Abstracting & Indexing

  Abstracting and indexing services providing coverage of Decision

  • Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) Academic Journal Guide
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
  • OCLC
  • PsycInfo
  • SCOPUS
  Special Issues
  • Judgment and Decision Research on the Wisdom of Crowds: Special issue of the APA journal Decision, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2024. The articles in this special issue represent the breadth of current research on the wisdom of crowds and also signal a wide array of ideas for future exploration.
  • Theory Integration: Part 2: Special issue of the APA journal Decision, Vol. 4, No. 4, October 2017. Includes articles about cue-based heuristics, quantum information architecture, naive Bayes, and fast-and-frugal trees.
  • Theory Integration: Part 1: Special issue of the APA journal Decision, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 2017. Articles discuss how theory integration uses different theories to provide complementary views or perspectives for understanding a common set of experimental findings.
  EDI Efforts

  Inclusive study designs

  • Diverse samples

  Definitions and further details on inclusive study designs are available on the Journals EDI homepage.

  Inclusive reporting standards

  • Bias-free language and community-driven language guidelines (required)
  • Author contribution roles using CRediT (required)
  • Data sharing and data availability statements (recommended)
  • Participant sample descriptions (recommended)
  • Constraints on Generality (COG) statements (required)

  More information on this journal’s reporting standards is listed under the submission guidelines tab.

  Other EDI offerings

  ORCID reviewer recognition

  Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) Reviewer Recognition provides a visible and verifiable way for journals to publicly credit reviewers without compromising the confidentiality of the peer-review process. This journal has implemented the ORCID Reviewer Recognition feature in Editorial Manager, meaning that reviewers can be recognized for their contributions to the peer-review process.

  Masked peer review

  This journal offers masked peer review (where both the authors’ and reviewers’ identities are not known to the other). Research has shown that masked peer review can help reduce implicit bias against traditionally female names or early-career scientists with smaller publication records (Budden et al., 2008; Darling, 2015).

  Author and Editor Spotlights

  A Journal for Research on Judgment and Decision Making

  Editor Spotlight

  • Read an interview with Tim Rakow, PhD
  • Read an interview with Editor David Budescu, PhD

  From APA Journals Article Spotlight ®