The Decision Process Scale (DPS): Self-Report Measures of Reliance on Rules, Cost-Benefit Reasoning, Intuition, & Deliberation in (Moral) Decision-Making

Understanding how people make decisions in specific situations is a central challenge in (moral) psychology research. Yet there are no existing self-report scales for measuring the process of decision-making in individual dilemmas (as opposed to general moral attitudes or beliefs about moral decision-making). We address this gap by devising new self-report measures of several of the processes by which people make moral decisions and validate them using realistic moral dilemmas, including six new vignettes that we developed. The resulting 12-item Decision Process Scale (DPS) can be used to measure how much people rely on rules versus cost-benefit reasoning and how much they rely on intuition versus deliberation in the specific moral dilemmas they face in a laboratory experiment or in the real world.