EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Prof Ben Newell (UNSW)

Psychology Colloquium: Monday 3rd October 5:00-6:00pm in Bayliss MCS G.33, followed by post-talk drinks in the Psychology Courtyard (or, in bad weather, the Psychology Common Room, 2nd floor of main psychology building)

Presenter: Prof Ben Newell (UNSW)

Title: Decisions from experience (and their possible implications for climate change).

Abstract:

Traditional research into risky choice relies on lotteries in which the consequences (outcomes) and their probabilities are explicitly stated to respondents – a decision from ‘description’. The last decade or so has seen a shift in interest to situations where responders must learn about outcomes and probabilities via sampling: decisions from ‘experience’. The comparison of these two classes of problem reveals intriguing discrepancies; for example in decisions from description people act as if they overweight the probability of rare events occurring, whereas in experience such events appear to be underweighted. In this talk I will discuss some key decisions-from-experience phenomena and draw out their possible implications for communicating the risks of climate change.

Presenter:

Ben R. Newell is Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Deputy Head of the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales. He is a former ARC Future Fellow. His research focusses on the cognitive processes underlying judgment, choice and decision making and the application of this knowledge to environmental, medical, financial and forensic contexts. He has published extensively in many of the leading psychology journals and is co-author of the book Straight Choices: The Psychology of Decision Making.