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The present study investigated whether individual differences between psychologists in thinking styles are associated with accuracy in diagnostic classification. We asked novice and experienced clinicians to classify two clinical cases of clients with two co-occurring psychological disorders. No significant difference in diagnostic accuracy was found between the two groups, but when combining the data from novices and experienced psychologists accuracy was found to be negatively associated with certain decision making strategies and with a higher self-assessed ability and preference for a rational thinking style. Our results underscore the idea that it might be fruitful to look for explanations of differences in the accuracy of diagnostic judgments in individual differences between psychologists (such as in thinking styles or decision making strategies used), rather than in experience level. Keywords Diagnostic classification · Thinking style · Decision makingClinical psychologists make multiple decisions and judgments in the process of helping people with psychological disorders (Garb 2005). Of these, diagnosing or diagnostic classification of a client's problems is a very important judgment since it will influence the clinical hypotheses and explanations generated, the formulations of prognoses and eventually the treatment recommendations made (Vermande et al. 1996).It has been suggested that consulting the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association 2000), which provides explicit and specific criteria for the diagnosis of the different disorders, is related to greater reliability, fewer biases and less under-and over-diagnosing than when classification is done without using such checklists (see Garb 1998). Yet diagnostic classification is not always done by comparing the client's symptoms to DSM-criteria. For instance, it has been found that experienced psychologists compare clients to prototypes (Garb 1996), that the construction of causal relations between symptoms may influence diagnostic classification (Kim and Ahn 2002) and that diagnosing disorders may involve the use of intuition (Srivastava and Grube 2009).In previous research concerning the accuracy of psychologists' judgments and decisions, a comparison has often been made between novices and experienced psychologists. In many such studies no significant differences in accuracy are found between these groups (e.g., see Garb 1998). A recent meta-analysis by Spengler et al. (2009) suggests that there is a small but reliable effect (d = 0.15) in favour of experienced clinicians. As the authors point out, this implies that very large samples are needed to have enough power to find significant results, which may be especially difficult with this group. Regardless of this, given this small effect size the authors raise the question whether experience is the best predictor of judgment accuracy. They call for more research into individual differences between psychologists, aside from their exper...

Psychological Science currently faces (a wide-spread realization of) several problematic issues. Many proposals have already been made in order to try and improve matters. One of which is signaling, promoting, and rewarding good and/or open practices via the use of badges that indicate that a paper provides access to things like open data, open materials, and pre-registration information. In order to maximize the possible usefulness of badges for signaling, promoting, and (possibly) rewarding good and/or open practices, using badges on CV’s could be of tremendous help in changing incentives.

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