Title: If We Are the Sum of Our Decisions, Does the Math Add Up?
Abstract: Much of my research over the past nearly three decades has focused on improving the quality of multi-attribute environmental decisions. This work has taken the form of both academic research and, of great importance to me, real-world applications involving real people navigating real problems. A suggestion by a friend about a decade ago inspired me to use some of our applied decision-structuring tools to explore a fundamental question: Just how good are people at choosing what matters to them? Our results reinforced prior findings on judgmental heuristics and biases, but with a twist: we were able to quantify the degree of alignment between what people said mattered to them and the extent to which their choices reflected those priorities. In this seminar, I will share results from this work, as well as from the research that came before and after it. I will also try to argue — gently — that there is real value (and need) for scholars of judgment and choice to conduct research aimed not only at describing how people make judgments and choices, but also at improving the extent to which those judgments and choices reflect what truly matters to them.
A former faculty member in the School of Environmental and Natural Resources here at OSU, Dr. Arvai is now the Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology, and the Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on improving the critical thinking, judgment, and decision-making capabilities of people. His research focuses primarily on contexts where people must make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty, and where they must confront tradeoffs across conflicting social, economic, and environmental objectives. His research also focuses on situations where people’s instinctive approach to judgment and decision-making is biased by unchecked emotions and motivated reasoning.
