A POLICY-CAPTURING APPROACH TO INDIVIDUAL DECISION-MAKING - A DEMONSTRATION USING PROFESSORS JUDGMENTS OF THE ACCEPTABILITY OF PSYCHOLOGY GRADUATE-SCHOOL APPLICANTS

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to carry out research using the policy-capturing method. The context for this tutorial was t hat of examining the decision-making policies of 19 university profess ors who rated hypothetical graduate student applicants with regard to the probability that they would accept them into graduate school in ps ychology. The raters were given five pieces of information (i.e., ''cu es'' in policy-capturing terminology) for each applicant to use in det ermining their ratings: GRE-Verbal score, GRE-Quantitative score, GPA over the last 15 courses, grade in a full-year undergraduate statistic s class, and the aggregated percentile at which three referees placed the applicant. Results are discussed in terms of interpreting the cons istency of the raters' weighting of the cues, the reliability of their decisions, and how to assess complex decision-making models. The disc ussion centers on methodological and theoretical issues arising from t he application of the policy-capturing approach to decision-making res earch.