Judgment and Decision-Making

Research in my lab also focuses on how people—working individually and in groups—instinctively (that is, without taking advantage of decision support tools) address unfamiliar or complex decision problems. Our research complements ongoing work by researchers at other institutions on the constructive nature of preferences and decisions. Our research in this area has helped to demonstrate that people construct their preferences, and make choices, “on the fly” in response to cues that are salient during the elicitation (i.e., decision making) process. This is in sharp contrast to the view held by many economists that people approach decision problems with stable preferences that are merely revealed during decision-making.  

Our prior research on this theme has included explorations of the degree to which people’s intuitive preferences are calibrated to preferences based on a more thorough prioritization of objectives; how the experiences of chronic losses influences subsequent decisions under risk and uncertainty; how feelings of fear and dread cause people to ignore data when making choices; how domain-specific knowledge influences concerns about risks such as climate change; and how we might prime critical reasoning to make people more discerning consumers of information. 

One of our current studies takes as its starting point the hypothesis that a hyper-focus on certain attributes of a problem—like climate change and carbon emissions—may serve to mask the problems underlying drivers (e.g., that, in the case of climate change, it’s the pursuit of economic expansion that is pushing modern society beyond Earth’s ecological limits). We’re studying this by manipulating how we discuss environmental and sustainability challenges to see how this influences judgments and decisions.