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This paper aims to investigate the decision-making on new ventures of eight directors or managers of Brazilian accelerators, aiming to understand if the Einstellung effect – mental rigidity – operates during the judgment of new ventures to accelerate.

Through a quasi-experiment design, the study was conducted with directors or managers of Brazilian accelerators, who were separately interviewed and responded to a psychological test, previously consented, as well as to a simulated decision-making questionnaire.

The selection process, with the criteria for decision-making, functions as a “template” for the recognition of potentially successful companies and is, indeed, subject to various cognitive biases, among which, the Einstellung effect, characteristic of mental rigidity.

The main contribution of the present study is to identify the cognitive mechanisms, which can negatively affect the evaluation of innovative projects and propose ways that can counteract or mitigate them.

The psychological approach to decision-making, usually studied in chess game context or problem-solving, was applied to a relatively unexplored field that is startups to accelerate. Its originality remains at the interdisciplinary approach, combining knowledge from psychology, decision-making and entrepreneurship.

This paper aims to provide a wide picture of studies on heuristics for international decision-making with a focus on foreign market entry. This paper systematically reviews studies published in the international business and international marketing domain to examine heuristically based decisions for foreign market entry.

This paper proposes a systematic literature review and an in-depth analysis of 32 papers published between 1997 and 2021 dealing with foreign market entry and the use of heuristics for international decision-making.

Even if the marketing and management literature is in many ways permeable to the debate around heuristics developed in experimental psychology and cognitive science, international business and international marketing studies on the one hand recognize that international decision-making, especially when dealing with foreign market entry, is strongly characterized by uncertainty, on the other hand, there isn’t a developed and systematized literature about it. This paper shows key topics and areas fundamental to foreign market entry in which heuristics are applied by decision makers and their effectiveness.

A systematic review of the use of heuristics for foreign market entry decision-making can represent a useful step for a more organic development of knowledge about the more general use of heuristics for international decision-making. Understanding the decision-making process on the modes of entry in foreign markets is a key topic for international marketing and international business scholars and practitioners.

Authenticity has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, leading to a rich but confused literature. This study, a review, aims to compare the psychology and sociology/tourism definitions of authenticity to clarify the concept. From a psychological perspective, authenticity is a mental appraisal of an object or experience as valued leading to feelings and summative judgements (such as satisfaction or perceived value). In objective authenticity, a person values the object due to belief in an expert’s opinion, constructive authenticity relies on socially constructed values, while existential authenticity is based on one’s self-identity. The resultant achievement of a valued goal, such as seeing a valued object, leads to feelings of pleasure. Sociological definitions are similar but based on different theoretical antecedent causes of constructed and existential authenticity. The paper further discusses the use of theory in tourism and the project to develop tourism as a discipline. This project is considered unlikely to be successful and in turn, as argued, it is more useful to apply theory from other disciplines in a multidisciplinary manner. The results emphasise that it is necessary for tourism researchers to understand the origins and development of the concepts they use and their various definitions.

This study aims to provide an overview of studies concerning bias in law, particularly in judges’ decisions. The authors intend to bring to light the factors that can most frequently lead to unequal decisions to enable judges to better perform their function.

A literature review was used as a methodology based on studies involving judges and juries.

The evidence reported by this review suggests how difficult the judge’s job is and how they can be unconsciously influenced by inferences, deductions and biases. The results show that the pleasantness of the witness and the confidence they exhibit during testification are crucial factors in influencing the decisions of judges and jurors. From these studies, it can be assumed that different personal aspects – smiling, pleasantness and the witness’s credibility – can be positively associated with each other, which could compromise the ongoing evaluation. Gender is another factor that can influence evaluations; in fact, witnesses are evaluated based on their own “gender” as well as that of the jurors. Another essential factor is self-confidence. Also, the age of both of the judge and of the witness can be a factor that influences decisions in court. Other factors such as communication effectiveness, degree of accuracy of reported information and non-verbal behaviour were also found to be important.

Among the limitations of this research, the authors have to consider the low number of available research and that the most of these derive from a specific cultural context – the American one. There may also be limits to the way in which certain concepts are used in different parts of the world, particularly through a very broad construct, such as the credibility of witness.

This study highlights which inferences and biases can characterise decision-making processes and, above all, highlights the need for specific training courses aimed at managing the many processes involved in influencing human decisions.

The authors believe that this work can raise awareness about the series of unconscious reasoning that may happen in the legal field, which has a major impact on people’s lives and on the general perception of justice.

In this research, the authors have considered some of the criteria that may intervene in the evaluation of witnesses, those present in the current scientific literature. From the research, it seems appropriate and necessary to provide judges with adequate training aimed at the recognition of their cognitive processes and bias. In fact, when they were made aware of them, they were less affected by bias, resulting in more objective and limiting improper inferences.

The purpose of this study was to examine how well a strength-based program grounded in positive psychology principles can advance the practical critical thinking skills of those pursuing the teacher training course.

This study used a single-group pre-test post-test design with 35 teacher-trainees from the Bachelor of Education course. The two-and-a-half-week strength-based program used the values in action survey to identify strengths. Pre- and post-test scores, measured with the Cornell Critical Thinking Test – Level Z, underwent Statistical Package for Social Sciences analysis including paired samples t-test for subcomponent and overall composite analysis.

Analysis of the pre- and post-test scores demonstrated a statistical significance in the critical thinking scores obtained by the teacher-trainees. Post-test scores were consistently significant. Out of the elements of critical thinking, induction, meaning, observation and credibility were more prominent. Deduction and assumption identification were also having a significant effect.

Most critical thinking programs focus on evaluating specific teaching methods for improving critical thinking skills. In education, positive psychology studies often center on students’ well-being, attention spans and academic success, aligning with wellness programs. Despite the importance of strengths in positive psychology, there is a lack of research on using a strength-based approach to boost critical thinking skills. This study aims to enhance teacher-trainees’ critical thinking by leveraging their individual strengths, moving away from traditional instructional strategies.

This study aims to test the effectiveness of a training intervention based on the psychology of perception, delivered to young Italian workers and employees, with low education, hired with an apprenticeship contract and involved in a compulsory training course (duration 32 h; the training intervention reported in the paper covers the first 8 h) whose aim was to let them develop such relational competencies as communication and cooperation with others.

By making use of optical-geometric illusions and ambiguous figures, participants were accompanied through a training intervention with the dual purpose of undermining their naive certainties about why they see what they see and increasing their awareness of how the perceptual processes work. At the beginning of the intervention, at the end of the 32 h (that is, after about a month) and after about one year from the end of the course, participants were administered a questionnaire to monitor the results of the training course by measuring their “perception awareness”.

“Perception awareness” increased from the beginning to the end of the course and still scored higher after one year. “Perception awareness” was positively related to communication and cooperation.

Although the literature is full of training courses delivered to improve communication and cooperation with others, little research has been carried out on perception-based training interventions delivered to young adults with low education hired with an apprenticeship contract for which this kind of training is compulsory.