Behavioral Science Workshops

Invited guests, faculty, and students present current research in decision-making and judgment in our workshop series. The emphasis of our workshop series is on behavioral implications of decision and judgment models.

Workshop Details

• Where: Chicago Booth Harper Center, Classroom C06. Workshops will be offered IN-PERSON ONLY.
• When: Mondays 10:10–11:30 a.m. (unless otherwise noted)
• Who can attend: Workshops are open to Roman Family Center faculty, researchers, staff, and students, plus invited guests. Additional requests to attend the workshop are handled on a case-by-case basis. Please email yui.ito@chicagobooth.edu if you’d like to attend.
• Archive: For a full list of presenters 2004-present, see our workshop archive.

 

Fall Workshop Series 

Note: titles and abstracts are forthcoming. Check back soon for updates. 

September 30, 2024 

Nava Ashraf
London School of Economics

"Meaning at Work"

Firms traditionally use incentives to align their goals with the workers’. In this paper, we evaluate a firm’s attempt to do the opposite by encouraging employees to reflect on what gives their life meaning and whether this can be achieved at work. We randomize the rollout of a "Discover Your Purpose'' intervention among 3000 white-collar employees and evaluate their outcomes over two years. The intervention guides workers through a reflection process of pivotal life experiences, to promote a greater understanding of personal purpose by linking past memories and present work in a coherent narrative. We find that performance increases because the bottom performers either leave the firm, laterally move, or do better. Consistent with the intervention reducing the cost of effort of the workers who remain, we find that it flattens the trade-off between meaning and pay, as it is the highest paid among the low performers who either leave the firm or report higher meaning.

October 7, 2024 

Gordon Pennycook
Cornell University

"Deliberation Corrects"

Many of the problems that we face as a species emerge from failures of our own decision-making. However, a major impediment to developing meaningful solutions to this overarching problem is that there is substantial disagreement in psychology about the primary and characteristic sources of reasoning errors. Prominent theories espouse that deliberative reasoning is infirm in the face of salient intuitions and, when used, may actually exacerbate partisan bias via motivated reasoning. In this talk, I challenge these ideas and provide evidence that errors typically stem rather from a mere failure to sufficiently engage analytic thinking. I will focus on three projects for this talk: 1) An adversarial collaboration (with David Rand, Pete Ditto, and Jon Haidt) on whether social concerns undermines the influence of evidence during reasoning (they don't), 2) The role of overconfidence in conspiracy beliefs (it's important), and 3) Whether conspiracy theorists change their minds (they do).

October 14, 2024 

Piotr Winkielman
University of California-San Diego

"On the relation between mental effort and value"

What is the relationship between mental effort and value? About 20 years ago, my colleagues and I proposed that low effort (fluency) elicits positive feelings and thus improves stimulus evaluations. Plenty of empirical research in psychology, behavioral economics, biology, neuroscience, aesthetics, as well as computational modeling, supports our proposal. Still, I will discuss three challenges that suggest it is time for a more intricate view of the relationship between mental effort and value.
 
First, I will show that what is “mentally easy” is strongly shaped by categorization and context. Specifically, the very same stimulus (e.g., a face, a political stance) can be fluent and thus likable in one context but disfluent and dislikable in another.
 
Second, I will show that being “mentally easy” can have opposite effects on different kinds of evaluations. Specifically, fluency boosts evaluations of hedonic liking (pleasure) but simultaneously decreases evaluations of the financial value of the very same stimulus.
 
Third, I will show that being “mentally easy” can lead to benefits or costs depending on people’s general desire for certainty and their desire to achieve concrete goals. Specifically, a general goal to achieve certainty boosts the value of fluency, while a general goal to remain uncertain lowers the value of fluency. Furthermore, when a stimulus supports our concrete goal (e.g., promotes our preferred political or artistic message), fluency boosts its evaluation, but when a stimulus goes against our concrete goal, higher fluency lowers its evaluation.
 
Overall, my talk will emphasize the malleability of the relationship between mental effort and value.

October 21, 2024 

Don Moore
University of California-Berkeley, Haas School of Business 

"Model Uncertainty and Overprecision: Theory and Evidence"

People often make simplifying assumptions in order to understand complex systems. This fact can explain the ubiquity of overprecision: the tendency for people to be too certain they are right. The reason is that using simplified models that ignore some variation-inducing complexity causes judgments to be overprecise. We introduce a simple model of overprecision and then provide empirical evidence, both from the experimental laboratory and from the field, that tests the predictions of the theory.

October 28, 2024 

Daphna Oyserman
University of Southern California

"Identity-based motivation and making sense of difficulty"

People do hard things –sometimes, things that seem impossibly hard from an outsider’s view. But they also turn away from things that are even a bit hard, resulting in failures to progress on self-relevant goals. When people experience difficulties thinking about and working on their tasks and goals, does difficulty signal self-relevance or irrelevance? Do they double down and engage more, or shift away, disengaging and using their time elsewhere? What about when life itself feels hard? Do people carry their inferences about what life’s hardships imply over to preferences for means of goal pursuit? I address these issues in identity-based motivation theory, a social psychological theory of goal pursuit, motivation, and self-regulation. I predict and show that difficulty-as-importance, difficulty-as-impossibility, and difficulty-as-improvement mindsets are independent; that which people draw on is context-sensitive and matters for how they think and what they do. I present the theory and supporting experimental evidence, focusing on reasoning effects (inferences about time, time on task, efficiency, and performance) and strategy selection effects (more or less effortful means of attaining self-relevant goals). I also summarize supporting evidence using other methods --school-based interventions including data from over 4,000 students in Detroit, Chicago, and rural Nevada and Colorado, diary studies, cross-cultural comparisons, secondary data analyses, and simulation results.