Aims & Scope

The study of judgment and decision making (JDM) concerns normative, descriptive, and prescriptive analysis of human judgments and decisions. These topics may be studied from theoretical or applied perspectives, with the use of experiments, surveys, analysis of existing data, and other necessary approaches. The journal covers relevant content from several fields, including cognitive psychology, experimental economics, and experimental philosophy. We expect contributions to be accessible to readers in at least these fields.

Contributions to Judgment and Decision Making must fall within the above bounds and reflect issues central to the field. These issues include, but are not limited to the following:

Judgment 

• probability judgment 
• forecasting
• risk perception
• probabilistic inferences
• heuristics & biases, and debiasing
• lens model analysis

Decision Making / Choice

• decisions under risk, uncertainty, and certainty
• intertemporal choice
• emotion/affect and decision making
• decision making across the lifespan
• individual differences in judgment and decision making (including cognitive style) 
• process models (e.g., fast-and-frugal heuristics, coherence-based decision theories)

Judgment and Decision Making with consequences for others and further topics

• risk communication
• expert judgment
• moral judgments and decisions 
• cheating 
• strategic decision making / social dilemmas / trust / economic games
• fairness, money allocation, social preferences
• parochialism (in-group bias)
• dynamic decision making
• experimental philosophy concerning topics of JDM
• JDM across the lifespan

Methodology and Theory

• development of new tests and measures (also for non-WEIRD cultures)
• methods for process tracing and strategy classification in JDM  
• development of new theories / modification or specification of existing theories 
• advances in methods for improving JDM (e.g., wisdom-of-the-crowd)

We accept the following types of articles: 

• Empirical Article*
• Review Article*
• Theory Article*
• Registered Report*
• Commentary (invited only)

* These article types may be eligible for APC waivers or discounts under one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. Please see the journal’s Open Access Options page for instructions on how to request an APC waiver if funding is not available. 

Authors can access JDM's Overleaf template here.

Article Length

JDM does not have article length restrictions. If you have concerns about the length of your manuscript, please contact the Editorial Office.

Preparing your article for submission

Manuscripts should be compiled in a single document in the following order:

• Title page, including:
  • Authors, including Corresponding Author designation, full contact details and affiliations, including country
  • Abstract (up to 250 words)
  • Keywords (up to 10)
• Main text, including Author names, Table(s) with caption(s) and Figures with caption(s) in place throughout
• Acknowledgements
• Competing Interests Statement
• Financial Support Statement
• Supplementary Materials
• References

Both LaTeX and Word submissions should be accompanied by PDF files, both during the review process and in final export. 

Requirements

For empirical work, JDM requires the availability of raw data (with a key to the meaning of variable names, if needed), and stimulus materials such as questionnaire items, for review and for publication (unless this is impossible for some reason). These may be submitted as supplemental files or posted publicly somewhere else. If a submission is not rejected immediately, we will request these documents. Publications should, insofar as possible, include all key information necessary to understand (and replicate) the study and data analysis, including data, as well as stimuli, questionnaires, and code, when these are necessary to understand exactly what was done. More information, including suggestions on deposit, can be found in our guidelines on Research Transparency.

Registered Reports

A registered report is not the same as pre-registration, although that may be useful for many papers, including registered reports (see As Predicted). When submitting a registered report, please also include a separate explanation of why you are doing the study and why you want acceptance in advance. Following initial (pre-study) acceptance, authors are typically required by the action editor to register the approved protocol (e.g., on the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/rr/ or other recognised repository), either publicly or under private embargo until submission of the full manuscript with results. The full manuscript will then also contain the URL of the approved protocol.

Style guidelines

• Be consistent in the way you report statistics. Italics for "t", etc., are not required, but if you use them then use them consistently. Likewise spacing around "="; use it or not, consistently. Use parentheses, not commas, for statistical tests, and put the at the end of a sentence or clause if possible. Minimize the number of statistics you include. 
• Please use APA citation and reference style. (Not the rest of APA style.) This means that articles are cited by author within the text. Use "and" when citing multiple authors in the text, "et al." for three or more (unless it is important to list all authors), and "&" for citations in parentheses and for authors listed in the reference section. Do not put commas before the last "and" or "&".
• References are alphabetical at the end, with authors initials (not names) following each author's last name (e.g., "McCaffery, E. J., & Baron, J. (2006)."---note the spaces and periods). Volume numbers are in italics following the journal name (also in italics), followed by an optional issue number in parentheses (with no space before it) and a comma. Page numbers are required for everything. Journal titles, but not book titles, have all major words begin with upper case. Examples: Judgment and Decision Making (a journal title); Thinking and deciding (a book title)
• Spellings: "et al.", "etc.", "i.e.", followed by commas if the sentence continues. Don't use "cf." or "see". It is better to say, in a couple of words, why you are citing something, e.g., "see X for a review," "for additional supporting results," or "but see X for an opposing perspective."
• Punctuation: Footnotes at the end of a sentence or clause come after the period or comma. Use British style for quotations: all punctuation, including commas and periods, go outside of quotation marks, unless the punctuation was itself part of the quotation.
• Use footnotes, not endnotes.
• Do not use the term "ratio bias". Use either "denominator neglect"
  or "proportion dominance". (The latter indicates judgments based on proportions when differences would be more appropriate.) 
• Use 'external validity' rather than 'ecological validity' when referring to the representativeness of experimental stimuli. 
• In a regression model, you do not usually "control" for covariates. You "adjust" for them. As explained in the statistics guidelines, the adjustment is usually incomplete. 
• Say "almost significant", not "marginally significant". 
• Try not to clutter the text with redundant statistics, and put all statistics from tests in parentheses, preferably a the ends of clauses. 
• Use "subjects" or "participants" consistently, not both in the same paper. ("Subjects" is perfectly fine, even with APA.)

Statistical guidelines

Statistics is controversial, and we do not want to dictate everything when authors have a well-reasoned disagreement with conventional views or with what follows. But here is the starting point. The following checklist is about "red flags". These are not necessarily problems, but they will require examination before review. It will help if you yourself make sure that these issues will not cause problems, by reading the associated text below.

Please review our full statistical guidelines prior to submission.

Artwork, Figures, and Other Graphics

For initial submissions, please include figures, tables, and footnotes in situ in the text so that reviewers do not have to jump around too much.Tables, figures, and images must be cited in the text, for example (see Table 1). They should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, and captioned. Tables should always be provided in an editable format (not as image files). In case of acceptance, all images will need to be submitted as separate figure files. For detailed information on figure preparation, please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

Reproduction of copyright material: Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. A copy of the paperwork granting permission should be provided to the Cambridge production editor. You may be asked to pay a permissions fee by the copyright holder; any permissions fees must be paid for by the author. For an example of a permissions request form please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

Ethics and transparency policy requirements

Please review our ethics policies prior to submission as well as the journal's research transparency guidelines.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organizers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that any type of funding information or financial support to be listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can easily be tagged and captured separately.

Financial Support

Please supply all details required by any funding and grant-awarding bodies as a separate section of your manuscript, as follows:

For single agency grants: "This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx]."

For multiple agency grants: "This work was supported by the [Funding Agency 1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency 2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency 3] under Grant [number xxxx.]"

Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement:

"This research received no specific grant funding form any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors."

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials should be listed after the Financial Support Statement in the article and If the supplementary materials are submitted with the article, please include the following: "The supplementary material for this article can be found at [DOI link]". The link will be added in the production process. If the supplementary materials are deposited in a repository, please link it here. 

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Data must be available and open to reviewers at the time of submission. We encourage authors to publish data in an appropriate repository along with other relevant materials such as materials, code, or additional analyses. You may also do this in a supplement. In either case, cite these in the manuscript.