Research and Professional Interests

To download a copy of my CV, click here.

Human Risk Taking, Problem Solving, and Judgment & Decision Making:

• How do we achieve optimality in risk-reward calculation for high risk decisions (e.g., financial investment, extreme sports)? How and why do we fail to achieve optimality?
• How do emotions such as fear and other factors such as individual differences, expertise, and social influence (e.g., group dynamics, social proof, authority, leadership) affect individual and group problem solving, judgment, and decision making performance?
• How can existing empirical work be applied to better understand financial, scientific, and recreational risk taking, problem solving, judgment, and decision making? Specifically, how do automatic or unconscious influences affect these behaviors?

Attention, Consciousness, & Cognitive Control

• How do we switch attention among multiple tasks in everyday life?
• How do we focus our attention on goal relevant information while ignoring distracting, irrelevant information?
• How do conscious/goal-driven processes and automatic/unconscious processes interact in task performance?

Methodology, History, and the Philosophy of Science/Psychology

• What is the value, both historically and in contemporary science, of non-empirical methods such as introspection and thought experiments, for understanding the mind?
• What human cognitive biases are present in scientific judgments and decisions? Are these biases minimized or eliminated through the use of scientific methodology?
• How does instruction in the scientific method (specifically at the undergraduate level) differ between “soft” and “hard” sciences?