Managerial role associated with more automatic decision-making

Managers and non-managers show distinctly different brain activation patterns when making decisions, according to research published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

The authors of the study, led by Svenja Caspers of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Research Centre Julich in Germany, used functional MR imaging to track the decision making process for managers and non-managers. Subjects were required to perform equally repetitive decisions, one form of decision making occurring in every-day work life.

The authors found that manager and non-managers showed differential activation of cortical and subcortical during the decision process.

The results, they write, support the hypothesis that managers, given their increased pressure for frequent and rapid decisions, prefer a more heuristic, automated decision-making approach than non-managers do.

More information: Caspers S, Heim S, Lucas MG, Stephan E, Fischer L, et al. (2012) Dissociated Neural Processing for Decisions in Managers and Non-Managers. PLoS ONE 7(8): e43537. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0043537

add to favorites email to friend print save as pdf

Related Stories

Soccer -- the link between managers and captains

Feb 10, 2012

Soccer managers regard their captains as an extension of themselves, according to new research from Northumbria University, which could explain why Fabio Capello quit as England manager following the FA row ...

Awareness biases information processing

Nov 22, 2011

How does awareness influence information processing during decision making in the human brain? A new study led by Floris de Lange of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen, ...

Recommended for you

French firemen test hypnosis to help victims

2 hours ago

"Look me straight in the eye. Your mind is emptying, your body is relaxing," says the fireman, using the calming words of hypnosis to help a trauma victim—a technique being pioneered by fire crews in the eastern French ...

Day care may help kids of depressed moms

11 hours ago

(HealthDay)—Young children of depressed mothers may develop fewer emotional problems if they spend time in some kind of day care, a new study suggests.

One in four stroke patients suffer PTSD

13 hours ago

One in four people who survive a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within the first year post-event, and one in nine experience chronic PTSD more than ...

User comments

More news stories

Panic over MERS virus fades in Saudi

People in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province have again started greeting friends with the traditional kiss on the cheek, and face masks in public are becoming rarer, as panic subsides over the outbreak of a deadly respiratory ...

Validating maps of the brain's resting state

Kick back and shut your eyes. Now stop thinking. You have just put your brain into what neuroscientists call its resting state. What the brain is doing when an individual is not focused on the outside world ...