Tag Archives: decision making

Star Track: Mandeep K. Dhami

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mandeep-croppedThis week in Star Track we’re featuring Mandeep K. Dhami, PhD, who is Professor of Decision Psychology at Middlesex University. She received her PhD in Psychology from City University, London, UK. Her research focuses on human JDM and choice, and risk primarily in the criminal justice domain. Her previous academic posts include the University of Cambridge (UK), University of Maryland (USA), and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Germany). Mandeep has also worked outside academia for the Ministry of Defence and for two British prisons. Mandeep has also won several awards, including from Division 9 of the APA and EADM. Mandeep advises Government organizations nationally and internationally on criminal justice issues, and has helped to establish a Restorative Justice Program in the City of Victoria, Canada. Mandeep is Fellow of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI; Division 9 of the APA). She has authored over 80 scientific articles and book chapters, is the lead editor of the book Judgment and decision making as a skill: Learning, development, and evolution, and on the editorial board of prestigious journals such as Perspectives on Psychological Science. In her spare time, Mandeep is a competitive ballroom dancer, and has represented England in Latin formation.

I wanted to pursue an academic career in this field because… Well, actually, I hadn’t planned on an academic career in Decision Science…things just worked out that way, and I’m very pleased they did. I had worked in prisons as an assistant psychologist while doing my undergraduate degree, and had wanted to go into prison management afterwards. However, a head psychologist encouraged me to do a PhD – saying my career in prisons would benefit from having a solid research background. So, off I went to do a Masters in Criminology followed by a PhD in JDM – and although I never did return to work in prisons, I’ve been back behind bars many times in the UK, US and Canada to study prisoner decision-making. Decision Science affords researchers considerable opportunities to conduct studies in a variety of field settings.

I find the inspiration for my research mostly from the social world around me, and particularly from policy debates in the criminal justice arena. By starting with the problem first, I can be free to choose the most relevant theories and appropriate methods. Dogmatic adherence to theories and methods has blighted the development of social scientific fields, and doing research for the sake of doing research is a waste of opportunity. I want my research to ‘count’ – I want to change some aspects of the world I live in, and so I find myself conducting research to solve social problems.

When people ask me what I do, I say “I study how people think and make decisions, focusing often on people in the criminal justice system such as offenders, police officers and court judges.” There have been several occasions when this simple question and answer has led to extremely useful feedback on my research as well as new research opportunities.

The paper that has most influenced me is… Two books have influenced me hugely – Erving Goffman’s Asylums and Paul Meehl’s Clinical versus statistical prediction. Goffman taught me that to study people we need to see the world from their perspective,and Meehl taught me to question expertise rather than revere it.

The best research project I have worked on during my career… I’m not sure how to operationalize ‘best’ – there have been some projects that have been fun to work on and others that made my ‘head hurt’ – both types of projects produced publications I’m proud of. But, given that I have about 3 decades before retirement, I’d like to think the ‘best’ is yet to come….

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be… If I’d gone down the prison management route, I’d probably be a senior civil servant in the UK Ministry of Justice or Home Office by now.

The most important quality for a researcher to have is… In one word ‘resilience.’ Some of the most common phrases in academia include ‘rejected’, ‘declined’, and ‘unsuccessful’. What a lot of young academics don’t realise is that good researchers take this negative feedback and use it to improve their work – they don’t simply ignore it, and they certainly don’t just give up.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years… We have too many effects and not enough explanations. Our field needs to develop process models that integrate different theoretical approaches, and that are tested under representative task conditions. This can produce more robust findin gs, and those that translate to the world outside the laboratory.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is… Work on something you feel passionate about. This will hopefully mean you don’t give up when things get tough. Over time, you’ll learn to communicate the value of your work to others, and although they may not share your enthusiasm, they will come to appreciate your work, and you.

The one thing I’ve found most challenging is… The slow pace of academia; the time lag from having a research idea through conducting the research to publishing it can be several years; patience is not a virtue that I can say I have much of. Fortunately, the time lag has been reduced in recent years with e.g. the introduction of ‘online first’.

For more information on Mandeep, visit her page.

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Star Track: Peter McGraw

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Following on the success of our Research Heroes interviews, we’re launching a new interview series: Star Track. In this series, we turn the spotlight on researchers who will play an important role in shaping the future of the field. These people have already made a significant contribution with their ground breaking research and engagement in the research community –  you might know about them or might not, but you should definitely listen to what they have to say – enjoy!
First in our new series is Peter McGraw, an DSC_0667-1associate professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, who is an expert in the interdisciplinary fields of emotion and behavioral decision theory. His research examines the interrelationship of judgment, emotion, and choice, with a focus on consumer behavior and public policy. Lately, McGraw has been investigating what makes things funny. He directs at the Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL), a laboratory dedicated to the experimental study of humor, its antecedents, and consequences. He has co-authored The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, which hit the bookstores on 4/1/2014. Of recent note, McGraw made the 2013 Stylish Scientist List – probably because he likes to rock a sweater vest.

I wanted to pursue an academic career in this field because… I thought that pursuing an academic career would yield a stimulating yet leisurely intellectual life. (I was half right.) While researching grad programs, I read Tom Gilovich’s book: How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. By the end of chapter 2, I was hooked on the idea of studying judgment and decision making.

I find the inspiration for my research mostly from… Entrepreneurs and artists. Scientists don’t often think of their research as a creative endeavor that is important to share broadly with the world. I believe that the process of creating and disseminating scientific insights is enhanced by emulating people who have a different perspective and a broader array of tools. Also, behaving like an artist or an entrepreneur is much more fun than just trying to please peer reviewers.

When people ask me what I do, I say…. I study what makes things funny.

The best research project I have worked on during my career… In the summer of 2008, Caleb Warren and I set out to answer the question of why people laugh at moral violations. That project changed my life, as it spurred a quest to crack the humor code (something that behavioral decision theory’s “emotional revolution” had overlooked). The resulting paper, which published in Psychological Science in 2010, brought together my two main research areas at the time: moral judgment and mixed emotions. Caleb and I introduce the benign violation theory of humor and showed that moral violations can be a source of pleasure (something every good comic knows).

Everything came together just right; the paper was accepted with no requested changes – something that I never expect to happen again.

The paper that has most influenced me is… When Caleb and I were examining the research on humor, the theories didn’t seem quite right. Fortunately, we found a little-cited paper published by a linguist named of Thomas Veatch. To us, it was a huge advance over existing theories. Veatch’s work served as the foundation for the benign violation theory, which in turn, serves as the foundation for the research conducted in the Humor Research Lab.

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be… Starting some sort of business.

The most important quality for a researcher to have is… Perseverance. Repeat after me, “They can slow us down, but they can’t stop us.”

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years… Finding a way speed the peer-review process.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is… Write every day. Start today – and purchase the book: How to Write A Lot.

The one thing I’ve found most challenging is… Staying asleep until my alarm goes off. The work academics do is highly evaluative and uncertain – two conditions that contribute to anxiety. And anxiety gets me out of bed early. On the other hand, it has a silver lining. I believe that every day is a big day and should be lived with a sense of urgency. And big days rarely start with the snooze button.

For more information on Peter McGraw visit his page: http://www.petermcgraw.org/

For more information on his book see: http://humorcode.com/

Resource Scarcity: Improving microfinance with mental accounting

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In this first post of the resource scarcity series, Shereen talks about how we could potentially improve microfinance with the help of mental accounting. 

There is an anomaly in the economic literature called the “flypaper effect” that can be leveraged to help poor people make better investments. To understand what this phenomenon is, consider the food stamp program of the U.S. government. Food stamps are an example of what economists call “in-kind” grants. Basically, it is money that can only be spent on a specific good. When the government gives out food stamps to poor people, it expects that they will now be able to spend their money on other necessities, like paying bills. However, because people view in-kind grants differently than they see an equivalent amount of money, food stamp recipients might actually buy more food than they did before receiving food stamps. This would be an example of the “flypaper effect.”

While there are many potential explanations for the flypaper effect, several people, including Richard Thaler, suggest that this may be due to the ways people categorize and make their financial decisions, something called “mental accounting.” Mental accounting explains that people group different types of spending into different mental categories or “mental accounts”, which may result in seemingly irrational behavior. The flypaper effect happens because people fail to mentally transfer money between their different mental accounts. Continuing with the food stamps example, if people have a certain amount of money in their mental “groceries” account, then when they receive food stamps, it is as if they have more money in their groceries account. Instead of mentally transferring this extra money from their groceries account to, for instance, their “gas” account, people behave as if they are richer with respect to food, and they buy either more expensive food or greater quantities of food.

Although this could be a potential problem for the food stamps program, the flypaper effect could actually be used to improve microfinance initiatives in developing countries. Specifically, it could be used to get small business owners to invest more money and energy in their business.

For example, when researchers gave small Ghanaian business owners equipment or materials for their businesses, they behaved as if they were richer with respect to their business account: They spent more money on business-related items instead of using the extra money for household expenses, and this improved their situation. This was not true for the business owners who received an equal value in cash.

People also invest more money in their business if they receive a subsidy in an individual bank account as opposed to a joint (i.e., husband and wife) bank account. The researchers who discovered this phenomenon in rural Kenya argue that people “activate different behavioral savings rules” for these different accounts. People treat the individual bank account more like a “business account” and the joint bank account more like a “household” account, and thus, decide their account spending accordingly.

(Photo by Bryce Yukio Adolphson, © 2011)

(Photo by Bryce Yukio Adolphson, © 2011)

Thus, even though mental accounting can cause people to make poor decisions, it can sometimes work in their favor. The studies I described above indicate that microfinance institutions will have more success improving small businesses with in-kind loans rather than cash loans, and also more success with subsidies to individual, as opposed to joint, bank accounts. Might the flypaper effect also have implications for encouraging other types of saving among the poor? Or more spending on education? Would in-kind grants for vaccinations or routine physicals encourage greater uptake of and spending on preventative healthcare measures?

(For more, see Development Impact.)

Resource Scarcity: Is Less Really More?

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Editor’s note: This week we’re proud to launch the first of our streams of curated content. These streams will introduce readers to different areas of judgment and decision making psychology, with our sub-editors bringing us their expertise in the topic. Each series will kick off with an introduction to the area, followed by a range of content such as interviews and posts discussing different topics. This first one on the impact of resource scarcity on decision making will be curated by Caroline Roux from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Shereen Chaudhry from Carnegie Mellon University.  

“Whether we live in resource-poor circumstances or resource-rich ones, even if we’re loaded with more money or goods or everything you could possibly dream of wanting or needing, we live with scarcity as an underlying assumption. It is an unquestioned, sometimes even unspoken, defining condition of life.” – Twist and Barker (2006), The Soul of Money

LessMore

No matter whether we live in a resource-rich or a resource-poor environment, we are surrounded by reminders that resources may be insufficient to satisfy demand, which often inhibit us from acting on our needs and desires. Scarcity thus has important consequences on people’s judgment and decision making. Marketers have understood the appeal of scarcity for quite some time and have used it to sway consumers to want things more. There are however many other consequences to being exposed to scarcity-related cues or to living in scarce environments, which we are only beginning to understand. For instance, why are people willing to do all kinds of crazy things to get their hands on the best deals of the year? Why do poor people seem to always be making bad decisions (and are they really)? Scarcity seems to be a unique source of decision making errors and tendencies, which this series will attempt to unpack and explain.

More generally, living in deprived circumstances can also exacerbate the effects of many other psychological motivations and cognitive biases. The desire to buy status-related items is equally strong in, but more detrimental for, individuals who can hardly afford to buy staple goods. While we all struggle with self-control and saving for the future, payday loans appear most attractive to people in the lowest income brackets, the people least able to afford the astronomical interest rates. Aware of the challenges that people living under extreme resource scarcity face, organizations like “Innovations for Poverty Action” and the “Corporation for Enterprise Development” are beginning to address such issues by leveraging lessons from the fields of judgment and decision making, as well as behavioral economics.

In this series, we will present findings from behavioral research that helps better understand different consequences of resource scarcity. On the one hand, Shereen will take a “behavioral engineering” approach and present applications that help improve the lives of people living in poverty or developing countries, as well as other populations for which errors in human judgment and decision making are especially detrimental. Caroline, on the other hand, will present findings from different fields related to judgment and decision making to help explain the influence of scarcity in our everyday lives. We will cover a wide range of scarcity-related topics that will hopefully be of interest to you, readers of this blog, and we hope to stir your interest in this flourishing and fascinating field of research.

Research Heroes: Barbara Mellers

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BarbMProfessor Mellers is the 11th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at Penn University. Her research examines how people develop beliefs, formulate preferences, and arrive at choices. She focuses  on why  people deviate from principles of rationality and how those deviations influence consumer choices and cooperative behavior. She is currently exploring how to elicit and aggregate probability judgments to arrive at the best possible predictions of uncertain events. She has authored over 100 articles and book chapters. She was a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award and a past president of the Judgment and Decision Making Society.

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career …that all careers come to an end.  When I was young, I felt invincible, I thought I had all the time in the world. But reality caught up with me, and I have a different perspective now. Each research project might be the last, so each one should, at least in principle, be better than the one that went before it.

I most admire people …who are clear thinkers, beautiful writers, big dreamers, and hard-core scientists. They work through the implications of their ideas and are their own worst critics. And they do it all in the most graceful and elegant way imaginable.

The best research project I have worked on during my career… might be the one I am doing now on human forecasting. This is a large and long-term project that gives me the opportunity to work with many talented people with wide ranging and diverse skills. This project reminds me of an onion; we keep pulling off layers and finding more layers to go. It gets better and better. 

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…is the last thing in the world I want to talk about.

The most amazing or memorable experiences when I am doing research….happen when I am surprised by the results of an experiment. I once did an adversarial collaboration with Hertwig and Kahneman, Kahneman described the process perfectly. When the data don’t turn out right, we suddenly gain 20 IQ points. Everything seems to make perfect sense in a brand new light that was completely obscure until that moment! Unfortunately, those IQ gains disappear when the surprise is over.

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…is hard to imagine because there are always opportunities to tell stories. So I would never hold back on one that was worth telling.

A research project I wish I had done…is something I always thinking about.

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be in doing science in another field, and the choice of which field to pursue is a difficult forecasting problem. It is hard to know what areas of science will be the most exciting twenty years from now. The best fields to work in are ones that are changing fast due to the synergy of several good ideas and ingenious technological innovations. Neuroscience, astronomy, and genetics are good examples.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…is figuring out how we can make better judgments at individual, societal, and national levels. This goal applies to everything – medical decisions, career decisions, military decisions, romantic decisions, legal decisions, business decisions, policy decisions, and more. We need theories, but we also need to generate useful knowledge. That is the only reason why the public will listen.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…replicate everything you do several times. The truth, however hard it is to accept, is what moves science in the right direction and leads to progress. Admit your uncertainties; you aren’t the only one who has them. Remember that you can’t praise people too much (yes, we really are that shallow!). And last but not least, when in doubt, give credit to others. Time usually sorts things out.

Departmental site: http://psychology.sas.upenn.edu/node/20474

Research Heroes: Barbara Summers

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barbara%20summersBarbara Summers is a Senior Lecturer in Decision Making at Leeds University Business School, UK, where she also serves as co-Director of the Centre for Decision Research. She has recently been elected to serve as President Elect of the European Association for Decision Making (EADM), and currently serves on the Society’s Board as Member at Large. Her research focuses on individual decision making from both cognitive and emotional perspectives, with application areas in health, marketing and pensions. Her work benefits from her previous commercial experience as Head of Systems Development at Equifax Europe UK.

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…… the advantages of walking and patience. Sometimes projects take a while to get going; you have an idea, but investigating it leads into slightly unfamiliar territory so you feel there is a lot of literature to get through. Or you might feel you have lots of bits of the puzzle but can’t see how they fit together. It’s human nature to want results quickly and to feel disheartened in these situations, but don’t – this sort of project can be the most interesting in the long run, so it’s worth being patient and working through it. I find the best way to trigger the “eureka” moment when the bits click into place is to stop thinking. Walking while not focusing on your thoughts or sleeping are really good ways to do this. The idea of sleeping on a problem usually works for me (and recharges your batteries).

I most admire academically… because…There are a lot of people, but the work of Kahneman and Tversky on Prospect Theory had the biggest effect on me. I had been doing work in another field and realized that this theory gave a better explanation of some data I had than the traditional explanations in the literature. I was converted and decided to investigate the area further – well worth it! There are many others as I explore different aspects of decision making, but this was the first.

The best research project I have worked on during my career…/the project that I am most proud of/ that has inspired me most….There are so many different ways a project can be best – and I have been lucky enough to have quite a range of experiences. Some projects broaden your ideas of how the world works (I feel this about the work I’m doing now on emotion), while others can produce real world impacts that are satisfying to see (I did work on a project producing decision aids for patients, for example, and another project helped a company predict and respond to customer needs better). Some projects can just be a good experience in terms of getting to know others. I try to see the best in all of them.

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…/the one project that I should never had done…If you are doing research then some projects are not going to work. You might not get the results you want, you might even get results that prove you wrong. It’s frustrating, but most projects have some value in the longer term. The bad ones are ones you don’t enjoy working on.

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research….… is always the bit where the predicted results happen – I get a real buzz every time, because you now understand the world a little better.

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…I used to be involved in organizing a professional conference (while an academic) and there was a project that needed real managers to take part in the research. I suggested we might use the future delegates for the conference, and we could give a talk on the results in my session in exchange for their participation. The project was trying to identify ways in which professional managers’ decisions in a particular field (to do with corporate failure/ creditworthiness) demonstrated expertise, and to make it more interesting we also got groups of lecturers who taught techniques for making similar decisions, and their students, along with a group of lay people to provide a comparison. The professional society helped us distribute the questionnaires and we put the talk in the program. Then the results came in. Lecturers and students generally performed better than the professional managers on the tasks, and in fact the managers were barely better than lay people (who really knew nothing about the subject area). Welcome to the conference talk from Hell – we had to stand up and tell people (who paid to be there) that they were hopeless at a job related task!

In the end things were not so bad. The obvious “How can this have happened?” response gave way to an investigation of how the task (which the managers thought was important) fitted into their role as a whole, and led to an understanding that their real expertise was not in getting the right answer in the first place, but in managing the relationship with the company they assessed for credit as it developed (so these skills made more difference). We even managed to get a laugh when we gave the talk! I probably have told this to some people, so apologies if you heard it before…

A research project I wish I had done… And why did I not do it…I’ve not given up yet on any project I wish I’d done yet. If I still wish I’d done it, I still hope to manage it. Sometimes things drop off the list because I realise they won’t do what I want, but that’s it.

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be……probably back (or still) in the commercial world. I spent a lot of time in Business Analyst type roles doing quite a lot of greenfield development projects, where the company was moving into new territory or the client wanted to do something but didn’t have anything in place. These have quite a lot in common with research, certainly in the thinking process, so are fun. Some of the ones I was involved in were international joint ventures, so I got some chance to travel and see other perspectives. Not quite as much fun as academia, but still fun.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…Getting the real world more widely engaged. We’ve had a burst of interest in behavioral work in the UK, with the government setting up a Nudge unit. There are however a lot of fields where more behavioral aspects could give real benefits in solving real world problems (like helping people make informed decisions), and in benefitting business too. Students who’ve taken the Management Decision Making course run by our centre regularly report how useful it is in their careers from interview stage on, giving them a perspective on avoiding pitfalls in decision making (I wish I had done it before being a manager myself!). I see many opportunities, but we need to keep up momentum to get there.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…Enjoy what you do – you do better on projects that catch your imagination. Make contacts and work with others – ideas develop faster with more than one person thinking about them. Establish what you need to get to where you want to be. When I got my first lecturing post the Dean of my School gave me a list of promotion criteria for the next grade up and told me to start ticking them off as soon as possible. I found this really helpful in getting established, as someone moving across from industry, but I think it would have helped anyway. If you’re in this position, I wish you all the success in the world and have great time – academia is a great job.

Departmental website

Research Heroes: Ralph Hertwig

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Hertwig_Ralph_RGB_WEB[1]This week’s Research Hero is Ralph Hertwig, the Director of the Center of Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1995. Before being recruited to take the prestigious role as a director at the Max Planck Institute, he was professor for cognitive and decision sciences and dean at the Department of Psychology, University of Basel. He has received many grants and awards such as Fellow of APS, and won the teacher of the year award for the Department of Psychology two years in a row. His research focuses on models of bounded rationality such as simple heuristics and on decisions from experience. He has co-authored two books, and written numerous articles in journals such as Psychological Science, Psychological Review and many more.

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…That to make it in academia you need more than the obvious skills—you also need the ability to juggle lots of projects, to multitask constantly, and to delay gratification. Not to mention plenty of perseverance and a thick skin for weathering all the rejections, which keep on coming no matter how advanced you are in your career…

I most admire academically… because…People whose writing I love, such as William James, Stephen Jay Gould, and Steven Pinker. For me, Egon Brunswik was also an extraordinary writer. Many people tell me his writing is difficult to decipher. But I have the feeling he thought very hard about each of his sentences and that each one conveys exactly what he wanted to express.

The best research project I have worked on during my career…/the project that I am most proud of/ that has inspired me most….I’m most proud of the research projects where I teamed up with somebody from another field or another school of thought and we were able to produce something I could never have come up with on my own. Those sorts of collaborations have resulted in papers that I still find interesting when I peruse them today—for instance, work on the different experimental cultures in psychology and economics (with Andreas Ortmann); how to link the ACT-R architecture and simple heuristics (with Lael Schooler), and how to model parental investment with a single heuristic (with Frank Sulloway and Jennifer Davis). I enjoy starting a project in an area about which I know little and going home every evening with the feeling of having learned something new.

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…/the one project that I should never had done…I can’t think of a “worst” project. But I have a most difficult one. It was an “adversarial” collaboration with Danny Kahneman (and Barbara Mellers as arbiter). With the explicit goal of agreeing on designs that, no matter the results, would settle our disagreements, we exchanged many, many e-mails to hammer out the details of our joint studies—to no avail. The fickle deity of data thwarted all our plans: we just couldn’t agree on how to interpret the results. It was a painful process, but I’m glad that we could cordially agree to disagree and gained respect for one another along the way.

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research….My most amazing research experience was as a student, when I was doing an internship at a psychiatric research hospital. I had the idea of applying signal detection theory, which I’d just learned in class, to analyze an existing data set. It was the first time I wrote little statistical programs, and I was amazed that they worked and I could get the computer to do what I wanted… well, after a lot of trial-and-error and cursing. It made me so happy. Even more so when my advisor told me my fledgling analyses had produced some new findings. They led to my first published paper.

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…If I ever had one, I’ve already forgotten it, so it can’t have been that great a story.

A research project I wish I had done… And why did I not do it…That would be a case study of Monica Lewinsky that never got off the ground. It was back in 2002. I was working at Columbia University (in Elke Weber’s lab), and a friend and I went to a public question-and-answer session that Monica Lewinsky gave at Cooper Union in Manhattan. I think we were all struck by how intelligent she seemed, how thoughtfully she related her experiences, and how plausible her answers appeared. In fact, we came away with the impression that there were two Monica Lewinskys—the one we’d just seen in person and the image the public had formed of her. And that got us thinking about research on the fundamental attribution error, which says we all tend to attribute other people’s behavior to personality while largely overlooking the situational factors. We thought Monica Lewinsky would make a fascinating case study of the fundamental attribution error, so we wrote her a letter—I recently came across it in my files—asking whether she’d be interested in talking to us….

Of course, the reason the case study never happened is that she never responded to our letter. We knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who was probably able to get the letter to her, so I do believe she received it. Who knows, if she had responded, the fundamental attribution effect might be known today as the Monica Lewinsky effect.

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be…A political scientist. I can talk politics with friends and family for hours on end (ask my wife).

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…If I had to pick only one—and I believe there are quite a number—then it’s to work together to integrate our theories. It’s been said that psychologists treat theories like toothbrushes (no self-respecting person wants to use someone else’s). I think there’s a lot to that, and we need to change this.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…To read to the right and left of psychology, and to discuss your ideas with everyone around you. In my experience, new ideas don’t simply come to you but often arise in conversations, while attending a talk, or over coffee with colleagues.

Departmental page

Research Heroes: Jay Edward Russo

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RussoThis week’s Research Hero is Prof. Jay Edward Russo. Prof. Russo received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from University of Michigan. He has been working at Cornell University since 1985, and holds the S.C. Johnson Family Professor of Management at the business school. He has also been on the Faculty of the University of Chicago, the University of California, San Diego as well as holding visiting positions at Bocconi University (Milan), Carnegie-Mellon, and Duke, and Penn (The Wharton School). Prof. Russo’s research focuses on managerial and consumer decision making and one of his most important contributions is the work in information distortion and process tracing methods. Prof. Russo has published extensively in prestigious journals as well as co-authoring Winning Decisions (2002) and Decision Traps (1989). He has been on the editorial boards of leading journals such as Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and many more. He has also done consulting work for National Bureau of Federal Trade Commission, GTE Laboratories and General Motors Research Laboratories. 

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…Throughout your career, but especially prior to tenure, you will very likely be forced to make a tradeoff between good science and careerist tactics. A research topic that may contribute most to understanding J/DM may not be one that is currently well recognized and accepted by the field. The more novel the topic of one’s research, the more challenging will be its path to publication in journals, to grant support, and to other markers of acceptance by the field. The likelihood of lots of published papers is far greater if you work on currently accepted topics. You will need the publications, maybe many of them, to achieve careerist goals, especially tenure. The price to good science may be work that is incremental at best and “backfill” at worst.  I urge you to be fully aware of the tradeoffs that you make between better science and career advantage.

I most admire academically… because…
Herb Simon because he aimed so high as a scholar and as a citizen of his university and of the world at large– and because he was so successful as both scientist and a citizen.

The best research project I have worked on during my career…/the project that I am most proud of/ that has inspired me most….I stumbled on the phenomenon of decision makers’ distorting new information to support the currently leading alternative. I investigated this predecisional distortion of information for a decade or so, revealing some of its manifestations, boundaries, and consequences. One strategy for good science is to try to identify the underlying causes that explain why a phenomenon occurs, in the hope that even one of those causes may be fundamental enough to explain other phenomena as well. The attempt to explain predecisional distortion led to work that identified the goal of cognitive consistency as the main driver. This work relied on multiple methods, including some new to me (semantic priming and a lexical decision task) or simply new (in-progress assessment of goal activation). The result was unexpected and quite clear: only cognitive consistency caused information distortion, with alternative goals like saving effort playing no role at all. Subsequent work has confirmed that the goal of cognitive consistency is at least one driver of several other J/DM phenomena, thus validating the scientist’s strategy of seeking depth of explanation.

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…/the one project that I should never had done…There is no one project that I regret. Rather my regret is working on too many projects, drawn to each one because it was so genuinely interesting. I probably should have focused on those that were both most interesting and most important.

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research….After so many decades of research (five), there are many experiences; but it is more categories than individual events that come to mind in responding to this question. For instance, when I was younger, it was a great pleasure to have a senior scholar whom I respected proffer kind words about my work. Now I have the pleasure of supporting young researchers, reminding them that it may take several good ideas to find one both worthwhile and feasible and to remember in their enthusiasm and impatience that science is slow.

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…“There’s nothing new here.” These were the words of all three reviewers of one of the first submitted manuscripts on information distortion. Fortunately, each one identified a different well-known phenomenon of which information distortion was asserted to be merely another (unnecessary!) illustration. I do not recall the exact three, but early in this research stream the following were offered: attitude extremity/polarization, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the desirability bias (wishful thinking), the halo effect, and the prior belief effect. Fortunately, the editor was sensitive to the unusual combination of reviewers’ complete agreement (“reject this manuscript”) and complete disagreement (“just another example of [three distinctly different phenomena]”). As a result, he gave me and my co-authors the chance to explain why there was, in fact, something new in the phenomenon of information distortion. The subsequent explanation was accepted, along with the manuscript. The lesson I took from this experience was how reviewers (which means most of us) can so naturally filter our judgments through our own lenses. The question that I ask myself is whether I have applied that lesson consistently when I evaluate others’ work. The answer: probably not, but I do keep trying.

A research project I wish I had done… And why did I not do it…I cannot claim to have no regrets whatsoever (that would be hubris), but none of them involve a research project that I regret not attempting.

If I weren’t doing this, I would be…Likely retired, an unpleasant thought. There is still tread left, so please don’t retire me.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…One challenge is to encompass the growing breadth of J/DM phenomena and methods. Among the phenomena are those that are nonconscious, emotional, and contextual. Among the methods are those of neuroscience and of process tracing. In considering the opportunities and barriers to adopting these newer research topics and methods, I recall the observation that so often seems best to characterize a field’s response to such a situation, “We love progress; it’s change we hate”. My belief is that J/DM researchers, senior as well as junior, can master new methods and solve new problems. My hope is that more than a few will.

A second challenge is paradigmatic. J/DM emerged as a field by testing the optimal models of economics and statistics, especially EU and Bayesian updating. Violations of these models engendered the anomalies paradigm that has characterized J/DM for the last four decades. Let me suggest a challenge in the form of a question: what would J/DM look like if studied the way other higher-order psychological phenomena are approached, such as problem solving/reasoning and language comprehension? That is, what if we built theories of cognitive (and other) processes from process (and other) data, but without specifying optimal performance? Indeed, if we view behavior as driven by multiple goals not all of which are even conscious, can we really specify optimal performance? What if, instead, we viewed our subjects as adapting to the task environment that we scientists create in order to perform sufficiently well rather than optimally?  Great progress has been achieved in understanding how people read without the use of an optimal model of language comprehension. Might similar progress occur in J/DM by focusing less on how our observations compare to optimality criteria and more on the complexity of decision makers’ attempt to achieve multiple goals simultaneously?

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is…Learn how to select research problems, not just how to solve them.   Try to be strategic in how you approach your topics, colleagues, and journals.  Often I’ve seen a graduate student (or a credentialed researcher) happy just to find a candidate problem: “That would make a dissertation topic.” or “That could be publishable”. With my own students who are ready to find a dissertation problem, I ask them to identify three potential topics, to research each one for at least one week, and to evaluate their comparative merits. Then, and only then, do I want them to pick one.

Understand the J/DM paradigm in which you are working and think about whether a different one, maybe a newer one, might yield greater contributions to the field. Are input-output data sufficient, or would process data yield more insight? Is this the time or topic to bring in neuroscience? Should the analysis move from the attributes of the alternatives considered in a decision to the benefits that those attributes convey, or even to the goals that those benefits help to achieve? One of books that most influenced my graduate training is Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which focused on scientific paradigms. I still begin my doctoral seminar by asking students to read it.

Departmental page

The 10 dont’s if you want to be successful

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IMG_0642-small-filteredIn 2011, one of our research heroes, prof. Robin Hogarth, gave a fascinating and inspiring talk at the early career event of SPUDM23. At IndecisionBlog, we thought it would be useful to publish his talk on “the 10 dont’s” if you  want to succeed as a researcher.

General point: Enjoy life because you’re long dead (Scottish proverb).

10 important DON’Ts

1. Work on topics you are not really interested in.

2. Choose colleagues/advisors based just on status.

3. Ignore comments/advice of senior colleagues.

4. “Take your eye off the ball.”

5. Ignore teaching.

6. Over-teach (the rewards are immediate).

7. Ignore refereeing duties (always answer quickly and particularly if you cannot do the review)

8. Fail to keep your CV and web-site up-to-date.

9. Miss important conferences.

10. Ignore the network.

Some points to emphasize:

1. You have two bosses: your university and the profession. Demands can conflict.

2. In teaching rewards are immediate and frequent; this is not the case for research.

3. Always remember that “every talk is a job talk.”

Research Heroes: Max Bazerman

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Bazerman_25aThis week’s Research Hero is Prof. Max Bazerman, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Psychology Department, and the Program on Negotiation. Prof Bazerman’s research focuses on but is not limited to decision making, ethics, and negotiation. He has coedited more than 200 articles and 16 books, including Negotiation Genius, Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming, and How to Prevent Them, and the sixth edition of Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. He has international collaborations with over 25 countries and 50 companies in United States. Prof. Bazerman is also famous for being the one who introduced the science of negotiation in Business schools. He has received many awards, to name a few recent ones: honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), being named as one of Ethisphere’s 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics, one of Daily Kos’ Heroes from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco trial, and the 2008 Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management.

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career…

a) All good papers find homes

b) If the reviewer is being “stupid”, it is probably your writing that allows them to be “stupid”.  The solutions isn’t hoping for smart reviewers, but taking the perspective of the reviewer, and writing so that they see the brilliance in your work.  (and, if you don’t have those writing skills, find an editor)

I most admire academically… because…


a) Kahneman and Tversky, for outlining the most influential research direction in the social sciences

b) Thaler and Sunstein, for nudging us to how to put this brilliance into practice to make the world a better place

The best research project I have worked on during my career...the project that I am most proud of/ that has inspired me most….
The next project, which I do not even know about as I write this, that one of my brilliant doctoral students lures me into joining.

The worst research project I have worked on during my career…the one project that I should never had done…
My empirical work has co-authors, so I am going to refuse to answer this one.

The most amazing or memorable experience when I was doing research….The common occurrence of a brilliant doctoral student coming into my office to inform me about how wrong I am – again!

The one story I always wanted to tell but never had a chance…
I have told all my stories worth telling

A research project I wish I had done… And why did I not do it…Kern, M. and Chugh, D. (2009).  Bounded ethicality: The perils of loss framing.  Psychological Science, 20(3), 378-384. The paper is brilliant, simple, and important.  And, it is about things I know about.  I can’t figure out why I didn’t do this before Kern and Chugh.  I love this paper!

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be...less happy.

The biggest challenge for our field in the next 10 years…Changing our methods to cope with the insightful and important work of John, Leslie K., George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec. Measuring the Prevalence of Questionable Research Practices with Incentives for Truth-telling. Psychological Science (2012). Simmons, Joseph P.,  Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn.  False-Positive Psychology : Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting. Psychological Science (2011). My generation messed up, and led to the acceptance of bad practices with too many cute false positives.  We need to clean up our act, and the faster the better.

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is… Don’t p-hack (see Simmons et al., 2011).  The world is changing, detecting p-hacking is easy, and the value on integrity in research is going up very quickly.

Prof. Bazerman’s Wikipedia page