Previous research has assumed that therapist decision making is informed by the therapist's theoretical orientation. However, an important gap in the literature is that therapist decision making has not been examined from the perspective of social psychology. Research has examined how the social psychology of attributions accounts for other kinds of relationships but not therapeutic encounters. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine how therapist trainees determine preferences when doing therapy. The model for the decision was a Q sort of a broad sample of clinical options preselected for their social psychological implications. Clinical options were collected from practicing therapists and a survey was conducted to sort this sample into categories of social attribution, internality and stability. Factor analysis of preference sorts of these options by 1st-year (n = 20) and 3^rd-year (n = 17) female therapist trainees showed 3 patterns of therapist decision making: (a) concern with temporal immediacy and open therapeutic process, (b) emphasis on client contexts and autonomy, and (c) a classic client-centered perspective. Whereas internal attributions were preferred by almost all sorters and analysis of variance by categories of attribution showed significant differences between the decisional types, 1^st and last-year trainees did not differ. The design of this study demonstrates how therapist demographics, content of the decision, and clinical context can be systematically varied to build a 3-dimensional picture of decisional subjectivity. The results and the method in this study are important to social change because they point to how psychotherapy that actively includes client social context can promote not just psychological healing, but social action as well.