Acting in the Moment: Decision-Making Under Risk, Delay and Forward-Looking Environments
A special issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X). This special issue belongs to the section "Social Psychology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 5
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Understanding how humans make decisions that balance risk, time and social considerations remains a core challenge across behavioral sciences. Despite major advances, existing paradigms rarely integrate ultra-short time horizons or reconcile the well-documented description-experience gap in ecologically valid, high-stakes decision contexts, limiting applications to real-life decisions about health, environment, or finance. This Special Issue of Behavioral Sciences invites contributions that employ rigorous experimental and machine-learning approaches to examine cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying rapid, forward-looking, experienced decisions. We particularly encourage studies addressing open calls in the field: integrating temporal, risky and social dimensions of choice; improving experimental designs with experienced delays and probabilities; and linking laboratory findings to real-world outcomes. Papers may explore methodological innovations in joint elicitation of risk, time and social preferences, or computational modeling, as well as their translation into applications to sustainability, health and financial behavior. Contributions testing interventions (nudges, AI feedback, behavioral cues) designed for dynamic, real-time environments and advancing models of expectation formation and adaptive feedback in forward-looking environments are especially welcome.
By bridging economics, psychology and neuroscience, this Special Issue aims to advance theory, refine measurement and inform interventions and policy that promote better decisions under risk, delay and forward-looking environments.
Dr. Evgeniya Lukinova
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- decision making
- delay discounting
- risk
- description-experience gap
- cognition
- neural markers
- computational modeling
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