C. Dominik Güss

• Professor
• Presidential Professor at University of North Florida

Previous research highlights the need for developing techniques to improve decision making in uncertain situations. The current study explores the e ects of a brief training program on complex problem solving (CPS) and dynamic decision making (DDM) performance in two computer-simulated tasks with di erent task characteristics , ChocoFine (N = 76) a...

The study investigated infection variables and control strategies in 2020 and 2021 and their influence on COVID-19 deaths in the United States, with a particular focus on comparing red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) states. The analysis reviewed cumulative COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 by year, state political affiliation, and a priori latent fac...

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed more than anticipated about global human functioning and resiliency. This Philippines-based study replicated a recent U.S. COVID analysis on psychological well-being (PWB). Factors examined herein were grouped into categories for analysis: 1) predictors of PWB, 2) areas of greatest stress or worry (biggest concerns),...

Complex problem solving (CPS) research has focused on cognitive variables, but in recent years, the influential role of emotions and motivation during the CPS process has been highlighted. In the current study, we focus on emotion regulation during CPS. Eighty-three university students worked on a simulated chocolate-producing company. Initially, t...

Disaster management teams composed of experts from different countries will be more and more common in the future. As natural disasters are most frequent in Central America and Southeast Asia (developing countries with limited human and financial resources), their disaster-management organizations will more frequently seek help from the internation...

What do people in different cultures do when they encounter complex problems? Whereas some cross-cultural research exists about complex problem-solving predictors and performance, the process has rarely been studied. We presented participants from Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, and the United States with two computer-simulated dynamic problems,...

The current study extends existing research on human error by investigating human error in complex, dynamic, and uncertain microworlds. The main goal was to develop a taxonomy of errors for such situations. Several tasks with differing characteristics and demands on the problem solver were used: the simulation of a chocolate producing company (CHOC...

Following sociocultural and personality theory, the current study addresses the need to investigate the influence of the social context and related personality variables on risky decision‐making. Risky decision‐making was assessed in six daily‐life scenarios in a sample of 357 adult participants, ages 18–75. Scenarios differed regarding competition...

Confining and controlling infectious diseases, currently COVID-19, is a challenging task for politicians around the world. Since not much has been known about the virus initially, political decisions had to be made under uncertainty. Thus, worldviews and beliefs of politicians heavily influenced political decisions. The current study investigated p...

Previous research findings suggest that multiple factors contribute to writer’s block and that blocking may occur at any part of the writing process. The aim of this study was to investigate different causes of blocking and discover the most effective solutions for writers. 146 writers completed an online, mixed-method survey about their experience...

While in some countries, many people have died due to the coronavirus (COVID-19), in other countries, only a few have died. Based on the cultural values theory, our first hypothesis was that in countries that are predominantly individualistic, the number of deaths will be high, whereas in countries with predominantly collectivist values, the number...

COVID-19 has led to global dramatic shifts in daily life. Following the biopsychosocial model of health, the goal of the current study was to predict people’s psychological well-being (PWB) during the initial lockdown phase of the pandemic and to investigate which coping strategies were most common among people with low and high PWB. Participants w...

Steps involved in the creative process have been described in previous research, yet the exact nature of the process still remains unclear. In the current study, we take this investigation further, referring to two flying machines developed by Leonardo da Vinci and his other notes. Nine iterative steps are described with a focus on motivation and c...

The year 2017 had the deadliest incidents of gun violence ever in U.S. history; defined in our study as incidents with 4 or more persons killed or injured: 384 shootings with 466 people killed and 1,912 injured (Gun Violence Archive, 2017. Our study focused on the role of mental illness and other possible causes of gun violence by analyzing a minim...

Research articles are widely used in the training of undergraduate students. Editors and reviewers of the top scientific psychology journals influence the development in the field by publishing certain articles and rejecting others, probably assuming that the published articles are empirically sound and theoretically highly relevant. The current st...

Despite decades of research, more than 400 million people around the globe suffer from substance abuse and only 10% to 43% maintain abstinence after treatment. Social support, spirituality, self-control, and locus of control have all been examined for their efficacy and relationship with successful abstinence outcomes. Conceptually, educational/voc...

Decision making is a key cognitive process in all aspects of human life, professional as well as private life. The goals of this chapter are threefold. First, the chapter provides a short theoretical background on decision-making research highlighting the need for more comprehensive models of decision making. Whereas decision-making research has fo...

Thinking aloud is the concurrent verbalization of thoughts while performing a task. The study of thinking-aloud protocols has a long tradition in cognitive psychology, the field of education, and the industrial-organizational context. It has been used rarely in cultural and cross-cultural psychology. This paper will describe thinking aloud as a use...

The current study focused on concern about the conflicts, religiosity, gender, and left-right political attitudes as potential predictors and was conducted in the streets of Berlin, Germany, with a heterogeneous sample of 229 participants. Whereas low religiosity, high concern, and right-leaning political attitudes predicted aggressive conflict-res...

Patience is a highly relevant virtue in daily life. Yet patience has not yet been studied systematically across cultures. The aim of this study is to investigate three competing hypotheses. Based on the pace-of-life hypothesis, individuals that reside in countries with slower paces of life will be most patient. Based on the self-regulation hypothes...

Lake et al. discuss building blocks of human intelligence that are quite different from those of artificial intelligence. We argue that a theory of human intelligence has to incorporate human motivations and emotions. The interaction of motivation, emotion, and cognition is the real strength of human intelligence and distinguishes it from artificia...

Creativity plays an important role in the advancement of all societies around the world, yet the role of cultural influences on creativity is still unclear. Following systems theory, activity theory, and ecocultural theory, semistructured interviews with 30 renowned artists (writers, composers, and visual artists) from Cuba, Germany, and Russia wer...

Previous research on Complex Problem Solving (CPS) has primarily focused on cognitive factors as outlined below. The current paper discusses the role of motivation during CPS and argues that motivation, emotion, and cognition interact and cannot be studied in an isolated manner. Motivation is the process that determines the energization and directi...

Business owners are faced with complex problems and are required to make decisions on a daily basis. The purpose of this study was to investigate complex problem solving (CPS) between experts and novices and to explore the competing theories of expert-rigidity versus expert-adaptability, as part of exploring which theory better explains crystallize...

People from different cultures often do things quite differently. During the last decades, there has been research about how people around the world see the world and make decisions. What are similarities and cultural differences in thinking and where do they come from? We refer to three different studies. All these studies show cross-cultural diff...

The modern business environment requires managers to make effective decisions in a dynamic and uncertain world. How can such dynamic decision making (DDM) improve? The current study investigated the effects of brief training aimed at improving DDM skills in a virtual DDM task. The training addressed the DDM process, stressed the importance of self-...

The current study had three goals: (1) to investigate strategies, tactics, and errors as predictors of success and failure under uncertainty following the dynamic decision making (DDM) and complex problem solving (CPS) framework; (2) to use observation and to examine its reliability and potential as a data collection method when using microworlds;...

(* without Figure and Table because only plain text *) Analogical reasoning is one key element of creative thinking and one of the key human abilities of domain-general cognitive mechanisms (Keane 1988). A person takes the structure and elements of one domain and tries to apply them to the new problematic domain. Experimental research has shown th...

Lankford criticizes the notion that suicide terrorists are "normal" and argues that they are suicidal. We have two misgivings about this. First, he puts sole focus on the personal side of suicidality and ignores the individual's context. Second, he fails to elaborate on the intent to harm others, which must also include the cultural, political, rel...

Given Van de Vliert's impressive dataset and prognoses, I will discuss three limitations. First, the evolutionary argument does not adequately take into account how political changes influence freedoms. Second, the operationalizations of needs and freedoms are limited and questionable. Third, a direct relationship between climate, monetary resource...

People all around the world live in space and time. The short present moment fading away so quickly connects the depths of the past with the wide-open, unknown future. Time perception is the study of how species perceive and deal with time. Unlike waves of light that reach a specific sense organ, the eye, time is something invisible, which is perce...

This study explored undergraduate students’ interpersonal responses, namely general feelings toward and desire for further social interaction with trans persons in a helping context. Secondarily, this study explored the relationship between participants’ intrinsic empathy, interpersonal curiosity and interest in further interaction. Two hundred fif...

Disaster survivors have not only experienced a tragedy, but they may also have been simultaneously displaced to places usually unfamiliar to them. What does being displaced mean in terms of survivors' experiences? This qualitative study explored, through in-depth interviews, the experiences of nine displaced Hurricane Katrina (HK) survivors. Using...

Dynamic decision making (DDM) can follow various strategic patterns, one of them being stability versus flexibility. This paper explores the influence of uncertainty avoidance and expertise on stable versus flexible dynamic decision making. Participants were 40 German business students, 51 U.S. business students, and 66 U.S. psychology students. Ev...

Computer-simulated complex, dynamic, and uncertain problems, also called microworlds or virtual environments, are a fruitful method to study human decision making across cultures. They have characteristics similar to many real-life problems, yet they allow for experimental control. This paper discusses three crosscultural studies on dynamic decisio...

Dynamic decision making can follow various strategic patterns, one of them being stability versus flexibility. This paper investigates two competing theories explaining stability versus flexibility in 40 German business students, 51 U.S. business students, and 66 U.S. psychology students. Following cross-cultural psychological research, German stud...

Extending research on complex problem solving (CPS) and dynamic decision making (DDM), this study investigated the relationship between horizontal-vertical individualism-collectivism, complex problem-solving strategies, and performance in two computer-simulated problem scenarios with different task demands. Participants were 535 students from Germa...

People in every culture must deal with time and the uncertainties of the future. This study investigates how people in five countries make decisions in the dynamic simulation COLDSTORE with its non-linear time development (Reichert & Dörner, 1988). We expected that, (1) as in the original study (Reichert, 1986), only 20% of all participants would d...

In the scientific literature and popular media, the five terms suicide bomber, suicide terrorist, Islamic martyr, martyr or volunteer are often used interchangeably. This study investigates the mental representations related to these five different terms when the terms are presented individually and when they are embedded in the context of two scen...

This study is an attempt to analyze Hitler's decision making during World War II. Based on detailed historical sources, we specifically analyzed Hitler's decision-making failures and investigated the possible causes for these failures following theories on cognition, motivation, and action regulation. Failures such as underestimation of an opponent...

The ways in which people deal with complex and dynamic problems are shaped by their learning experiences within their culture as well as the functional constraints within which they have to operate. An experiment is described that explores the interaction of culture and ways of problem solving. University students from India and Germany had to work...

Research in the fields of complex problem solving (CPS) and dynamic decision making using microworlds has been mainly conducted in Western industrialized countries. This study analyzes the CPS process by investigating thinking-aloud protocols in five countries. Participants were 511 students from Brazil, Germany, India, the Philippines, and the Uni...

Recent research suggests that unconscious processing is superior to conscious processing in tasks involving many decision alternatives (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). One explanation for these findings is the limited information processing capacity of the human working memory and the almost unlimited resources of unconscious processing. The current st...

Cross-cultural psychological studies mostly focus on differences between countries. This study uniquely focuses on intracultural variations of values based on descriptors of artifact data, jeepneys (public transportation vehicles), and on interviews with jeepney drivers. The sample consisted of 200 jeepneys and their drivers in Manila and Davao, no...

Variables influencing inferences about a stranger's goal during an unsolicited social interaction were explored. Experiment 1 developed a procedure for identifying cues. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the relative importance of various cues (space, time, characteristics of oneself, characteristics of the stranger, and the stranger's behavior) for goa...

What political, economic, religious, and emotional factors are involved in a person's decision to kill civilians and military personnel through the sacrifice of his or her own life? Data for this research were secondary analyses of interviews with Islamic martyrs, as well as their leaders’ speeches. This investigation into the cultural-psychologica...

Altruism research has focused on culture and personality but rarely on the influence of religious attitudes on altruism. This study investigated altruistic decision making in U.S. Christian and Jordanian Muslim students. Results show cross-cultural differences that can partly be explained by empathy and by several assessed religiosity variables.

Altruism research has focused on culture and personality but rarely on the influence of religious attitudes on altruism. This study investigated altruistic decision making in U.S. Christian and Jordanian Muslim students. Results show cross-cultural differences that can partly be explained by empathy and by several assessed religiosity variables.

Behaving altruistically is highly regarded in many religions around the world. According to the Christian bible, for example, “Love Thy Neighbor” is indispensably linked with being close to God and alms-giving as one of the five Pillars of Islam is linked with strong Muslim faith. This study investigated altruism in a U.S. Christian sample (N= 187)...

Metacognition, the observation of one's own thinking, is a key cognitive ability that allows humans to influence and restructure their own thought processes. The influence of culture on metacognitive strategies is a relatively new topic. Using Antonietti's, Ignazi's and Perego's questionnaire on metacognitive knowledge about problem-solving strateg...

How do cultural values influence individuals' decision making? One would expect answers to this question either from cognitive psychology or from cross-cultural psychology. Cognitive theories on decision making, however, rarely consider the factor of culture, and research in cross-cultural psychology deals only to a small extent with decision makin...

Abstract Complex,problems ,have often been described along certain dimensions, e.g. complexity, transparency, and dynamics. However, problem descriptions of the researcher and problem-characteristics perceived ,by the ,participant might differ. This study investigates subjective task complexity and its relationship to complex ,problem ,solving perf...

Planning is a fundamental cognitive ability that helps in organizing and structuring events unfolding in a person's daily life. Two studies are presented that analyze planning behavior in different cultures: Brazil, India, and Germany. The first is a cross-cultural psychological study in which students develop plans for uncertain problem scenarios....

In cognitive psychology, there is an increasing interest in problem solving and planning processes in complex and ill-defined situations. To examine cultural differences in planning processes, two instruments are used both with Brazilian and German university students (n = 38 each) as participants: the Planning Inventory, which consists of everyday...

Previous research on complex problem solving (CPS) has been conducted mostly in western-industrialized countries and has often focused on individual differences such as intelligence to explain performance. We tested a model postulating that cultural values influence CPS strategies and CPS strategies in turn influence performance when controlling fo...

Recent research suggests that incubation is superior to metacognition in tasks involving many decision alternatives (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). One explanation for these findings is the limited information processing capacity of working memory. The current study further investigates this topic by using more complex tasks as many errors in Dynamic...