ERIC J. JOHNSON is the Norman Eig Professor of Business.  His research interests are in consumer and managerial decision-making and electronic commerce. He is among the most widely cited scholars in marketing, according to the Thompson Scientific Highly Cited ratings. His work on electronic commerce has been published in the Communications of the ACM, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and Management Science. He has presented his work before the Federal Trade Commission, and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Readers Digest, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, Marketplace, and the CBS Evening News. He is a coauthor of two books: Decision Research: A Field Guide and The Adaptive Decision Maker. His research in behavioral economics has appeared in Science, Journal of Economic Theory, as well as in two books. Earlier work examining the role of affect and similarity in understanding risk in papers has been published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology.  In addition, he is the director of the Columbia Center for Excellence in E-Business, and co-director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University.

PHILIP E. TETLOCK is the Leonore Annenberg University Professor in Democracy and Citizenship of the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences and of the Department of Management in the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an author and editor of numerous acclaimed books, including Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, for which he received the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book published on government, politics, or international affairs and the Robert E. Lane Award for best book in political psychology from the American Political Science Association; and Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology, for which he received the Philip Converse Book Award for outstanding book in the field published five or more years ago from the American Political Science Association.

His research program focuses on decision processes and social and cultural psychology, and covers four board areas: accountability, value conflict/taboo trade-offs/protecting the sacred, the concept of good judgment, and political versus politicized psychology. He has published prolifically in a wide-range of outlets in the fields of Psychology, Management, Marketing, and Political Science. His work has been covered in the New York Times, the Business Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Fortune Magazine, the New Yorker, and National Public Radio. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Psychological Association and has received the Grawemeyer World Order Prize, Harold Lasswell Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution in the Field of Political Psychology from the International Society of Political Psychology, National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of War, and Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Social Psychology from the American Psychological Association, among many others.

BARBARA MELLERS is the I. George Heyman University Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Arts and Sciences and the Department of Marketing in the Wharton School. She is a globally recognized scholar of judgment and decision-making on topics ranging from perceptions of fairness and emotions that follow from choice to preference reversals and contextual effects. She is the author of almost 100 articles and book chapters, co-editor of two books, and a member of numerous prestigious editorial boards such as Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Early in her career, she has been recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award and since then, she has continuously received major research support from the National Science Foundation for over 25 years. She is now the Associate Editor of the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making and on the internationally recognized Scientific Advisory Board at Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

Trained as a psychologist, Barbara Mellers studies behavioral decision-making and develops models that describe how people actually make judgments and decisions. Her research interests focus on human decisions that deviate from rational or normative principles due to fairness concerns, anticipated emotions, contextual effects, or response mode effects. Mellers’ work crosses the boundaries of traditional disciplines, illuminating not only human behavior but also such areas as justice, risk management and behavioral economics. She is also interested in how behavioral decision making can shape better public policy.

ELKE U. WEBER is the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Psychology and Earth Institute Professor at Columbia University. She is an expert on behavioral models of decision-making under risk and uncertainty, investigating psychologically and neurally plausible ways to model individual differences in risk taking and discounting, publishing in top journals in Psychology, Management, and Earth Science. She and her work have been featured in media outlets such as the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and National Public Radio on many occasions. In October 2011, Weber was part of an elite team of behavioral and climate scholars that participated in a five-day workshop with the Dalai Lama.

Weber is currently the co-director of the Columbia University Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and the Columbia Business School Center for Decision Sciences and is past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Society for Neuroeconomics. Weber has edited two major decision journals, Risk Decision & Policy and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, serves on the editorial boards of multiple journals across several disciplines and on advisory committees of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences related to human dimensions in global change, and is a lead author in Working Group III for the 5th Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Weber was recently elected to the German National Academy of Sciences.

DAVID BROOKS is a New York Times Op-Ed Columnist. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on "The PBS Newshour." He is the author of "Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" and “On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense,” both published by Simon & Schuster. His most recent book is “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,” published by Random House in March 2011.  He also frequently appears as an analyst on NPR’s "All Things Considered" and the "Diane Rehm Show" as well as a guest on the "Charlie Rose Show."  His articles have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, the Washington Post, the TLS, Commentary, The Public Interest and many other magazines. He is editor of the anthology "Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing" (Vintage Books).

Abstracts of Talks

Eric J. Johnson, Columbia University

"Designing Decisions: Can How You Ask Shape Choice?"

All decisions are designed, either by accident or with intent. These decision designs can have a large effect on what we choose, whether it involves organ donation, or choosing a mortgage, a light bulb, or deciding whether we believe in global warming. Designers of choices need a framework to understand the impact of how they portray options upon decision-makers. In this talk, I will outline of the many possibilities that face choice architects, present many examples and sketch some guiding principles. Among others, choice architects must select defaults, determine the framing, ordering and number of alternatives and attributes, as well as a host of other factors. Despite the fact that decision-makers are unaware of their impact, these design decisions help determine the options we choose.

Readings for Professor Johnson's seminar are available here:

Reading 1
Reading 2
Reading 3
Reading 4

Barbara Mellers, University of Pennsylvania

"Challenges to Judicial Decision Making"

Judges and jurors face a difficult task. They should simultaneously convict individuals who commit crimes and acquit those who are innocent. The job is not easy because the evidence is often ambiguous. In this talk, I will present evidence that judicial decisions can be flawed, and in tests of statistical versus intuitive predictions, linear models outperform human judgments. Finally, using a normative model and existing data on the ability of people to discriminate signals from noise, I will argue that jurors are making many more errors than most of us would find acceptable. The results have implications for the processes we use and the conclusions we reach when faced with judicial decisions.

Readings for Professor Mellers' seminar are available here:

Reading 1

Philip E. Tetlock, University of Pennsylvania

"Estimating the Value of Thinking About Thinking:
A Test of Simple System 1 Heuristics and
More Complex System 2 Inferential Rules"

There is a deep rift in the field of judgment and decision-making between those scholars who emphasize the adaptive benefits of fast-and-frugal heuristics (sometimes designated System I) and those scholars who warn of the susceptibility of these heuristics to error and the need to rely on more reflective and self-corrective forms of cognition (sometimes designated System II). In my earlier work (Tetlock, 2005, Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?), I found evidence that support the adaptive benefits of System II cognition: political experts who second-guessed themselves were somewhat better at assigning realistic subjective probability estimates the possible futures. In collaboration with an interdisciplinary research team, I am currently conducting a series of more comprehensive tests of the relative performance of System I heuristics versus more complex System II inferential rules. System 1 heuristics require a simple cause-effect generalization, such as status quo rule of thumb, the Realpolitik rule of thumb, the populism rule of thumb, and the optimism versus pessimism rules of thumb. I will discuss findings that shed new light on the ability of forecasters and forecasting algorithms to perform these System I benchmarks.

Readings for Professor Tetlock's seminar are available here:

Reading 1
Reading 2

Elke U. Weber, Columbia University

"Query Theory: Knowing What We Want by
Arguing with Ourselves"

Psychologists and behavioral economists agree that many of our preferences are constructed, rather than innate or pre-computed and stored. Little research, however, has explored the implications that established facts about human attention and memory have when people marshal evidence for their decisions. This talk provides an introduction to Query Theory, a psychological process model of preference construction that explains a broad range of phenomena in individual choice with important personal and social consequences, including our reluctance to change and excessive impatience when asked to delay consumption.

Readings for Professor Weber's seminar are available here:

Reading 1
Reading 2