Research in the Decision Making Lab focuses on how people make judgments and decisions, how those decisions can go wrong, and how data and research methods can help us make better ones. The specific projects underway vary from semester to semester. Students work collaboratively as part of a research team, participating in different stages of ongoing projects such as reviewing research, developing materials and methods, collecting or coding data, analyzing results, and communicating findings. The lab’s projects change over time, but examples of topics we may study include the following.
Sports Analytics
Sports provide an unusually rich setting for studying judgment, decision making, and the relative contributions of skill and chance. Large amounts of publicly available data make it possible to examine both theoretical questions and practical decisions.
One current project examines skill and luck in professional sports. Using season standings from major U.S. sports and European soccer leagues, we are studying how much variation in team performance reflects differences in skill rather than the variability expected from chance, how likely the better team is to win an individual game, how leagues differ on these measures, and whether these patterns have changed over time.
Other sports analytics projects might examine questions such as whether apparent sports momentum reflects a genuine change in performance or a cognitive illusion, what factors contribute to home-field advantage, how coaching decisions affect the probability of winning, or how teams can allocate limited resources effectively when constructing a roster.
Decision Making and Decision Hygiene
Judgments and decisions can be affected by systematic biases as well as random noise. Research in this area examines cognitive limitations, heuristics such as availability, representativeness, and anchoring, and social influences such as conformity and groupthink.
Lab projects might investigate these sources of error or evaluate forms of decision hygiene designed to reduce them—for example, reframing a problem, aggregating independent judgments, considering alternative explanations, using reference classes, or relying on mechanical decision aids. These ideas can be studied in settings ranging from professional psychology and medicine to law, public policy, and everyday decision making.
Collective Decision Making
Many important decisions are made not by individuals but by groups, organizations, markets, or governments. These decisions often require balancing different preferences, incentives, values, and sources of information.
Research in this area might examine topics such as voting and public choice, rational ignorance, concentrated versus dispersed costs and benefits, institutional incentives, or differences between market and governmental decision-making processes. Projects may use these ideas to better understand decisions involving education, criminal justice, environmental policy, or other social issues.
Research Methods
Research itself involves a series of decisions: how to design a study, how much data to collect, how to analyze the results, and what conclusions the evidence supports. Because statistical intuition is often unreliable, quantitative methods can help researchers make these decisions more effectively.
Projects in this area might examine meta-analysis, statistical power, effect sizes, confidence intervals, replication, measurement, research design, or alternative methods of analyzing and interpreting data. A central goal is to understand not simply how a statistical technique works, but when it provides useful information and how methodological choices affect the conclusions researchers draw.
Joining the Lab
There are several ways to participate in the Decision Making Lab during semesters when it is running.
Students who would like to satisfy the PSY 390 Collaborative Research requirement by joining the Decision Making Lab may register for the lab when it is offered as an open-enrollment PSY 390 section. No application or instructor permission is required.
Students interested in joining the lab through PSY 395 Advanced Collaborative Research—for example, after already completing PSY 390 or if PSY 390 is not required for them—or through PSY 492 Senior Collaborative Research as a Senior Experience should complete the Psychology Department’s Common Lab Application.
Because the labs offered and recruiting students can change from semester to semester, check the Psychology Department’s Recruiting Labs page for current information about whether the Decision Making Lab and other departmental labs are accepting students for the upcoming semester.