Insights in cognitive patterns: Essays on heuristics and identification

People are inclined to find patterns in everything they sense, even if there is no pattern to discover. Humans use action-oriented mental patterns as rules of thumb, so called heuristics, in speedy decision-making. At the same time, we see this desire for pattern finding in social orderliness, in cognitive social psychology, when studying identification. Drawing on analyses of three distinct datasets, this dissertation presents four interrelated studies that aim to advance our understanding of human thinking processes and behavior. Social identification and heuristics are the central topics of this dissertation. Our first study on biases reveals that rational information processing reduces some biases, and that an interaction between rational and intuitive information processing potentially reduces biases to a further extent. In the second study, an experimental approach is taken, regarding the preference for ambiguity in a voting context. By zooming in on projection bias, we come up with an alternative explanation for the preference for ambiguity in voting. The third study is conducted in an organizational setting focusing on organizational identification and its interaction with task autonomy as a determinant of job satisfaction. We find that organizational identification acts as a buffer for the negative effects of low task autonomy. In the fourth study, the focus is again on voting ambiguity, but now with a focus on identification, which seems to have an effect on voting ambiguity as well.