Main Research Interests

Causal Discounting When explaining events, individuals tend to prefer a single cause to multiple causes. For example, when the lawn is wet, an individual is faced with several possible causes; it could have rained, or the sprinklers could have turned on. However, once it is clear that it did rain, the individual might consider it less likely that the sprinklers turned on, even though these causes are not mutually exclusive. The individual is discounting the possibility that the sprinklers caused the moisture. Our research investigates discounting in several domains.

Fluency Fluency is the ease with which information can be processed. For instance, the top font on the right is fluent because it is easy to read, but the bottom font is disfluent because it is difficult to read. The literature has shown that fluency influences a wide variety of judgments and cognitive operations--including judgments of truth, intelligence, familiarity, attractiveness, and more. Our research investigates how and when fluency will affect our judgments.

Perceptions of Randomness One area of interest is how people understand random events, and use the concept of randomness in their daily lives. To this end, there are several programs of study we have been working on.

Charitable Giving The unfortunate truth is that disasters are a frequent occurrance in the world. Fortunately, so is charitable giving. Since these contributions form such an important factor in the eventual outcome of disaster-stricken areas, we have begun a research project looking at people's giving. Most previous research in this area has focused on which people donate - a person-level question. Instead, we're looking at which disasters get the most charitable giving - a disaster-level question. Our goal is to eventually create interventions that would lead to more donations.

Other Research Interests

Increasing Statistical Power On a whim, we decided to run a study to look at whether participants actually read the instructions during research tasks. We were stunned to learn that up to 30% fail to read instructions! Since then, we have been developing methods to identify those who don't read instructions, and to increase compliance with instructions. We have been working with our collaborator Nick Davidenko on computing how much statistical power these techniques gain us. The results are striking: using these techniques allows one to run up to 30% fewer subjects while maintaining power. We continue to attempt to find better ways of gaining compliance with instructions during studies.

Voting Models in Choice In one of the more eccentric research projects we have worked on, we have explored the implications of voting models in choice. There are many possible strategies individuals could use in making a decision. What if people used several of them at once? And what if differences in the outcomes of those strategies are resolved through a voting mechanism? Although this idea seems farfetched on the surface, using simple voting geometry one can predict a number of decision anomales that have posed major challenges to theories of decision making. While the theory (at the moment) is rather underconstrained, it does provide an interesting alternative to utility based decision models.

Pointing This project is really the brainchild of our collaborator Adrian Bangerter. We became interested in pointing gestures. In particular, how good were viewers of a pointing gestures at determining the intended target of the point? What followed was a series of studies in which we learned that pointers weren't actually pointing at what they were trying to point to, and guessers had trouble determining what was being pointed to. We used some very interesting methodologies in looking at these questions. Ask us for details sometime.