Academic Bio

I received undergraduate degrees in philosophy and in psychology from UC Irvine, and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1994. I've been at UC San Diego my entire career, initially solely in the Department of Psychology, and since 2006 I've had a joint appointment with the Rady School of Management, where I hold the Jerome Katzin Chair in Corporate Governance.

I am an experimental cognitive psychologist interested in judgment and decision making, rationality, and creativity. Most decision making research emphasizes the gap between how people behave (psychology) and how they ought to behave (rationality). I find much of the mainstream research to be overly simplistic, though, in terms of both the psychological and the rational analyses, and this has created, or at least exaggerated, the perceived gap between behavior and rationality. However, more sophisticated psychological and rational analyses -- especially those that take into account the informational structure of the environment -- often reveal a surprising convergence, rather than divergence, between behavior and rationality. Much (though not all) of my research is in this latter vein, providing rational analyses of purportedly irrational behavior.

I am fortunate to have won research awards from the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award) and from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award), and am grateful for the many years of funding from NSF.