# The Decision Process Scale (DPS): Self-report measures of reliance on rules, cost–benefit reasoning, intuition, and deliberation in (moral) decision-making

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new tool to measure how people make moral decisions by assessing their use of rules, reasoning, intuition, and deliberation.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel self-report scale for measuring specific decision-making processes in moral dilemmas.

## Key findings

- The 12-item Decision Process Scale (DPS) was developed and validated using realistic moral dilemmas.
- The DPS measures reliance on rules versus cost–benefit reasoning and intuition versus deliberation in specific dilemmas.
- Six new vignettes were created to support the validation of the DPS.

## Abstract

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.