Metaphor pervades discussions of important socio-political topics. Recent research indicates that metaphorical language can influence how people reason about such topics, potentially affecting real-world decision-making. In this study, we report on research into the effects of metaphor on evaluative judgment, another aspect of decision-making that has been less well studied than reasoning. We u...

Decision making about outsourcing or insourcing of manufacturing activities is a type of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, which requires considering quantitative and qualitative factors as evaluation criteria simultaneously. Therefore, a suitable MCDM method can be useful in this area as it can consider the interactions among quantitative and qualitative criteria. The analytic...

A primary goal of clinical practice is to respect patient autonomy. To promote this goal for patients who have lost the ability to make their own decisions, commentators recommend that surrogates make their treatment decisions based on the substituted judgment standard. This standard is commonly interpreted as directing surrogates to make the decision the patient would have made in the circumst...

Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMF) is thought to be important in human decision making, but studies to date have focused on decision making under conditions of uncertainty, including risky or ambiguous decisions. Other lines of evidence suggest that this area of the brain represents quite basic information about the relative "economic" value of options, predicting a role for this region in va...

Blindsight and other examples of unconscious knowledge and perception demonstrate dissociations between judgment accuracy and metacognition: Studies reveal that participants' judgment accuracy can be above chance while their confidence ratings fail to discriminate right from wrong answers. Here, we demonstrated the opposite dissociation: a reliable relationship between confidence and judgment a...

How can collective decisions be made among individuals with conflicting preferences or judgments? Arrow’s impossibility theorem and other social-choice-theoretic results suggest that, for many collective decision problems, there are no attractive democratic solutions. In response, deliberative democrats argue that group deliberation makes collective decisions more tractable. How can deliberatio...

I study associative processing in high-level judgment using vector space semantic models. I find that semantic relatedness, as quantified by these models, is able to provide a good measure of the associations involved in judgment, and, in turn, predict responses in a large number of existing and novel judgment tasks. My results shed light on the representations underlying judgment, and highligh...

Decisionmakers use confirmatory search strategies in judgment tasks. As a result of this, their attention towards task-relevant cues is biased in favor of cues supporting available responses. Changing these responses can alter the cues used in the judgment task and, subsequently, alter beliefs. We use this mechanism to predict and explain the emergence of the asymmetric dominance effect in judg...