Judgment is the process of making decisions with incomplete information concerning either the outcomes or the decision factors. Sound judgment that leads to good decisions is an essential skill needed by adventure education and outdoor leadership professionals. Cognitive psychology provides several theories and insights concerning the accuracy of human judgment. Selective perceptions refers to the fact that perceptions are selective, reconstructive, and subject to memory biases. The context in which one encounters a situation affects the way it is perceived, and therefore will affect judgments and decisions. There are three such context effects: the primacy effect, the recency effect, and the halo effect. General rules to help find solutions are known as "heuristics." Although generally helpful, heuristics can be obstructive by creating predictable biases. Two impediments unique to group decision-making are "groupthink" and "social loafing." Three main types of common traps in decision making are overconfidence, self-fulfilling prophecies, and behavioral traps. The five types of behavioral traps discussed are the time delay trap, ignorance trap, investment trap, deterioration trap, and collective trap. Strategies to mitigate each of these phenomena are given. (TD)