Clarkson University Fall 2024 David A.Walsh ‘67 Seminar Series
Wednesday, November 20th at 12pm in SN 213
Mind, money, and misinformation: The cognitive processes underlying risk perception
Connecting insights from cognitive science and economic risk preferences and the perception of risk contributes to a better understanding of how humans make judgments and decisions. Risk preferences in economics are typically modelled as a marginally decreasing utility function. From a psychological perspective, this function can also be understood as a perceptual bias, which provides novel insights into the foundation of risk preferences. Based on a series of behavioral experiments I will further argue that risk preferences are also shaped by meta-cognitive insights about the limits of one’s own cognitive capacity. Finally, I will present empirical evidence indicating that people use simple heuristics to assess the variability of outcomes and events. These heuristics enable them to navigate complex environments but they also lead to counterintuitive judgments in situations when information is experienced over time. Together, these results have important implications for research in economics, management, and psychology and they can help to solve real world problems that often depend on human risk perception and -communication.
Benjamin Scheibehenne. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Benjamin Scheibehenne is a full professor of Cognition and Consumer Behavior at the KIT. He has a background in Experimental Psychology and Marketing and he is interested in how people interact and make decisions in an economic context. Towards this goal, he conducts behavioral experiments, develops and estimates mathematical models and he engages in statistical data analyses. Professor Scheibehenne’s work has appeared in the leading journals in Psychology, Marketing, Management, and Cognitive Sciences, including Psychological Review, Management Science, Psychological Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology-General. Before he started at the KIT he was a full professor of Cognition and Consumer Behavior at the University of Geneva School of Economics and Management in Switzerland (2015-2020), a senior scientist at the University of Basel Center for Economic Psychology (2009-2015), and a Postdoc at the Cognitive Science Department at the University of Indiana in Bloomington (2008-2009). Professor Scheibehenne did his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin in 2008 and he graduated from the Department of Psychology at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
The Seminar Series is a weekly colloquium series that has been supported through generous gifts from David A. Walsh ‘67.