Research

If you’re looking for a precise definition, I’d say the current research focus of my team and I is on gaining a better understanding of—and then trying to improve—people’s reasoning and decision-making abilities. I don’t mean by “improve” that, when it comes to decisions, we have the answers and the people we work with don’t. Instead, we work with people to reinforce approaches to decision making that are working, and to help them course-correct in those areas where they wish that they were doing better. 

This means, our work is usually set against situations where people have to make choices under conditions of risk and uncertainty, and when they are confronted by the need to make tradeoffs across conflicting social, economic, and environmental objectives. Our research also tends to focus on situations when people’s first instincts when forming a judgment or making a choice might be biased by unchecked emotions or other motivations.  

Most of our research can be applied. We focus on the perceptions and decisions made by everyday people, and by technical experts, business leaders, and policymakers. And we do our research in a wide range of contexts, from how leaders set environmental policy to how all kinds of people choose consumer products.  

I’ve been at this job for a while now, which means I’ve worked on all kinds of different projects and problems. They include research on climate change, natural hazards like forest fire and floods, space exploration, energy transitions, international development, food and agriculture, oil pipelines, geoengineering, business strategy, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, and fake news and misinformation. 

At the end of the day, the projects my team and I work on, and the theoretical perspectives that we take, depend largely on the interests of the partners and students I’m working with at any given time. Generally speaking, research by my team and I falls under four broad themes: