Chagrin Falls High School student Mia Buno has earned recognition as a published student researcher, with her original study examining how people make moral decisions appearing in the October 2026 issue of the Oxford Journal of Student Scholarship.
Her research paper, titled "The Impact of Heuristics on Moral Decision-Making Confidence: A Quantitative Comparative Analysis," explores how different decision-making strategies influence a person's confidence when faced with moral dilemmas.
Buno focused her research on heuristics, the mental shortcuts people use to make decisions quickly without evaluating every possible outcome. While previous studies have examined how these shortcuts affect everyday decisions, Buno wanted to understand their influence on moral choices, particularly how confident people feel about the decisions they make.
To investigate, Buno designed a quantitative study examining five common moral decision-making strategies: social proof, authority figure, betrayal, tit for tat, and acts versus omission.
Each strategy represents a different influence on decision-making. For example, social proof involves following the actions of others, while the authority figure strategy relies on guidance from someone considered trustworthy. The betrayal strategy examines how broken trust affects moral judgments, and tit for tat involves responding to someone's actions with similar behavior.
Buno developed five moral decision-making scenarios and modified them to reflect each of the five strategies. She then distributed surveys to high school students, asking participants to respond to the scenarios and rate their confidence in their decisions.
Her analysis revealed statistically significant differences in confidence levels between certain strategies. Participants reported greater confidence when responding to scenarios involving betrayal than when using social proof or authority figure strategies.
The findings challenged part of Buno's original hypothesis, which predicted that social proof would increase confidence. Instead, her research suggested that emotional factors, particularly those involving trust and betrayal, may play a stronger role in how confidently individuals make moral decisions.
Buno also examined the potential real-world applications of her findings. Her research suggests that understanding how people respond to betrayal could help businesses, public figures and legal professionals better understand public reactions, rebuild trust and communicate more effectively.
In her published paper, Buno acknowledged limitations in her research, including the relatively narrow demographic of survey participants and the challenges of predicting how individuals would respond to hypothetical moral situations. She identified opportunities for future studies involving more diverse populations and additional decision-making strategies.
The publication represents an accomplishment in independent student research, requiring Buno to examine existing scholarly literature, develop a research question, design a study, collect and analyze data, and communicate her findings in a formal academic paper.
Her work also demonstrates how student research can contribute to broader discussions in psychology, ethics and human behavior.
Buno's paper appears in Volume 12, Number 3 of the Oxford Journal of Student Scholarship, published in October 2026. The journal is available at www.oxfordjss.org.