Andreas Wilke, associate professor and chair of the Psychology Department at Clarkson University, has been invited to address a group of Psychology students being inducted into the international psychology honor society, Psi Chi, at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Utica, NY on April 15.
Wilke will speak to the group about “the misperception of randomness”. With the help of his undergraduate research students, Wilke studies cognitive biases such as the hot hand phenomenon—in which people often perceive sequential events as “clumpy” or “streaky” even though the observed events follow no particular pattern—and what role human cognitive evolution may play in why some cognitive biases are so hard to come by.
Wilke joined Clarkson in 2009, he was named chair of the Psychology Department in the School of Arts & Sciences in 2018. Before coming to Clarkson, Wilke worked as a pre-doctoral researcher at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
His postdoctoral training included posts at the Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles; and at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Altenberg, Austria. He also served as research scientist and instructor at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Wilke’s research interests include the evolution of human judgment and decision-making capacities, how people deal with risk and uncertainty, how humans and animals forage for resources, and statistical thinking in children.
Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology, was founded in 1929 with a mission to encourage excellence in scholarship and advance the science of psychology. There are more than three-quarters of a million lifetime members and 1,150+ Psi Chi chapters.