Daniel Goldstein

Last updated

Daniel Goldstein
Born1969 (age 53–54)
United States
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Chicago
Known for Decision making
heuristics
Awards Max Planck Institute Otto Hahn Medal (1997)
Scientific career
Fields Psychology
Behavioral economics
Computer science
Institutions Microsoft Research

London Business School
Columbia University

Max Planck Institute
Doctoral advisor Gerd Gigerenzer
Website dangoldstein.com

Daniel G. Goldstein (born 1969) is an American cognitive psychologist known for the specification and testing of heuristics and models of bounded rationality in the field of judgment and decision making. He is an honorary research fellow at London Business School and works with Microsoft Research as a principal researcher.

Contents

Education

Goldstein received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Chicago in 1997. [1]

Career

Goldstein and his doctoral advisor Gerd Gigerenzer started the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where Goldstein worked as a research scientist for several years.

In 2002, Goldstein became associate director of the Center for the Decision Sciences [2] at Columbia University before becoming an assistant professor of marketing at London Business School in 2005. In 2009, Goldstein accepted an offer as a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. [3] In 2012, Goldstein was part of a group of Yahoo scientists who left en masse to found the New York City lab of Microsoft Research, where he is senior principal research manager. [4] [5]

Goldstein's doctoral thesis used computer simulation to study the accuracy and frugality of satisficing heuristics for making inferences. Investigations of the take-the-best heuristic [6] and the recognition heuristic [7] were later published as journal articles in Psychological Review and in the book Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. [8] These fast and frugal heuristics have since had an impact in medicine, law and politics, and other areas outside psychology. [9] [10] [11] [12] With Eric J. Johnson, Goldstein authored an article on organ donation in the journal Science [13] [14] [15] [16] Along with Nobel Laureate William F. Sharpe, he created the Distribution Builder method for eliciting probability distributions. [17] [18] [19] Hal Hershfield and Goldstein ran virtual reality experiments in which people saw renderings of themselves as senior citizens and increased their intentions to save for retirement, as discussed in Goldstein's TED talk The Battle Between Your Present and Future Self. [20]

In 2014, Goldstein was elected president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. [21]

Notable contributions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive bias</span> Systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.

Heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.

Bounded rationality is the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal.

The representativeness heuristic is used when making judgments about the probability of an event under uncertainty. It is one of a group of heuristics proposed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the early 1970s as "the degree to which [an event] (i) is similar in essential characteristics to its parent population, and (ii) reflects the salient features of the process by which it is generated". Heuristics are described as "judgmental shortcuts that generally get us where we need to go – and quickly – but at the cost of occasionally sending us off course." Heuristics are useful because they use effort-reduction and simplification in decision-making.

The conjunction fallacy is an inference from an array of particulars, in violation of the laws of probability, that a conjoint set of two or more conclusions is likelier than any single member of that same set. It is a type of formal fallacy.

The recognition heuristic, originally termed the recognition principle, has been used as a model in the psychology of judgment and decision making and as a heuristic in artificial intelligence. The goal is to make inferences about a criterion that is not directly accessible to the decision maker, based on recognition retrieved from memory. This is possible if recognition of alternatives has relevance to the criterion. For two alternatives, the heuristic is defined as:

If one of two objects is recognized and the other is not, then infer that the recognized object has the higher value with respect to the criterion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerd Gigerenzer</span> German cognitive psychologist

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist who has studied the use of bounded rationality and heuristics in decision making. Gigerenzer is director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, both in Berlin.

In psychology, the take-the-best heuristic is a heuristic which decides between two alternatives by choosing based on the first cue that discriminates them, where cues are ordered by cue validity. In the original formulation, the cues were assumed to have binary values or have an unknown value. The logic of the heuristic is that it bases its choice on the best cue (reason) only and ignores the rest.

The gaze heuristic is a heuristic used in directing correct motion to achieve a goal using one main variable. An example of the gaze heuristic is catching a ball. The gaze heuristic is one example of psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer's one good reason heuristic, where human animals and non-human animals are able to process large amounts of information quickly and react, regardless of whether the information is consciously processed.

Heuristics is the process by which humans use mental short cuts to arrive at decisions. Heuristics are simple strategies that humans, animals, organizations, and even machines use to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems. Often this involves focusing on the most relevant aspects of a problem or situation to formulate a solution. While heuristic processes are used to find the answers and solutions that are most likely to work or be correct, they are not always right or the most accurate. Judgments and decisions based on heuristics are simply good enough to satisfy a pressing need in situations of uncertainty, where information is incomplete. In that sense they can differ from answers given by logic and probability.

Cognitive bias mitigation is the prevention and reduction of the negative effects of cognitive biases – unconscious, automatic influences on human judgment and decision making that reliably produce reasoning errors.

Heuristics are simple decision making strategies used to achieve a specific goal quickly and efficiently, and are commonly implemented in sports.

Social heuristics are simple decision making strategies that guide people's behavior and decisions in the social environment when time, information, or cognitive resources are scarce. Social environments tend to be characterised by complexity and uncertainty, and in order to simplify the decision making process, people may use heuristics, which are decision making strategies that involve ignoring some information or relying on simple rules of thumb.

Ecological rationality is a particular account of practical rationality, which in turn specifies the norms of rational action – what one ought to do in order to act rationally. The presently dominant account of practical rationality in the social and behavioral sciences such as economics and psychology, rational choice theory, maintains that practical rationality consists in making decisions in accordance with some fixed rules, irrespective of context. Ecological rationality, in contrast, claims that the rationality of a decision depends on the circumstances in which it takes place, so as to achieve one's goals in this particular context. What is considered rational under the rational choice account thus might not always be considered rational under the ecological rationality account. Overall, rational choice theory puts a premium on internal logical consistency whereas ecological rationality targets external performance in the world. The term ecologically rational is only etymologically similar to the biological science of ecology.

In behavioural sciences, social rationality is a type of decision strategy used in social contexts, in which a set of simple rules is applied in complex and uncertain situations.

Debiasing is the reduction of bias, particularly with respect to judgment and decision making. Biased judgment and decision making is that which systematically deviates from the prescriptions of objective standards such as facts, logic, and rational behavior or prescriptive norms. Biased judgment and decision making exists in consequential domains such as medicine, law, policy, and business, as well as in everyday life. Investors, for example, tend to hold onto falling stocks too long and sell rising stocks too quickly. Employers exhibit considerable discrimination in hiring and employment practices, and some parents continue to believe that vaccinations cause autism despite knowing that this link is based on falsified evidence. At an individual level, people who exhibit less decision bias have more intact social environments, reduced risk of alcohol and drug use, lower childhood delinquency rates, and superior planning and problem solving abilities.

The less-is-more effect refers to the finding that heuristic decision strategies can yield more accurate judgments than alternative strategies that use more pieces of information. Understanding these effects is part of the study of ecological rationality.

Intuitive statistics, or folk statistics, refers to the cognitive phenomenon where organisms use data to make generalizations and predictions about the world. This can be a small amount of sample data or training instances, which in turn contribute to inductive inferences about either population-level properties, future data, or both. Inferences can involve revising hypotheses, or beliefs, in light of probabilistic data that inform and motivate future predictions. The informal tendency for cognitive animals to intuitively generate statistical inferences, when formalized with certain axioms of probability theory, constitutes statistics as an academic discipline.

The psychological research on the future self examines the processes and consequences associated with thinking about oneself in the future. People think about their future selves similarly to how they think about other people. The extent to which people feel psychologically connected to their future self influences how well they treat their future self. When people feel connected to their future self, they are more likely to save for retirement, make healthy decisions, and avoid ethical transgressions. Interventions that increase feelings of connectedness with future selves can improve future-oriented decision making across these domains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Hertwig</span> German psychologist

Ralph Hertwig is a German psychologist whose work focuses on the psychology of human judgment and decision making. Hertwig is Director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He grew up with his brothers Steffen Hertwig and Michael Hertwig in Talheim, Heilbronn.

References

  1. ↑ "Daniel Goldstein CV".
  2. ↑ "The Center for the Decision Sciences - Home". Archived from the original on October 21, 2009. Retrieved July 23, 2015.
  3. ↑ "Home | research.yahoo.com".
  4. ↑ Strange, Adario (May 3, 2012). "Microsoft Opens New York Research Lab With Former Yahoo Scientists". PC Magazine .
  5. ↑ "Dan Goldstein at Microsoft Research".
  6. ↑ Gigerenzer, Gerd; Daniel G. Goldstein (1996). "Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality". Psychological Review. 103 (4): 650–669. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.174.4404 . doi:10.1037/0033-295X.103.4.650. PMID   8888650 . Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  7. ↑ Goldstein, Daniel G.; Gerd Gigerenzer (2002). "Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic". Psychological Review. 109 (1): 75–90. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.75. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0025-9128-B . PMID   11863042 . Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  8. ↑ Gigerenzer, G.; Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. the ABC Research Group. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-514381-2.
  9. ↑ Bower, Bruce (May 29, 1999). "Simple Minds, Smart Choices". Science News. 155 (22): 348–349. doi:10.2307/4011573. JSTOR   4011573.
  10. ↑ Menand, Louis (August 30, 2004). "The Unpolitical Animal". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on June 4, 2013.
  11. ↑ Kiviat, Barbara (August 16, 2007). "Why We Buy the Products We Buy". Time . Archived from the original on October 18, 2007.
  12. ↑ Gigerenzer, Gerd; Christoph Engel (2006). Heuristics and the Law. New York: MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-07275-5. Archived from the original on March 2, 2008. Retrieved February 29, 2008.
  13. ↑ Johnson, Eric J.; Daniel G. Goldstein (2003). "Do defaults save lives?". Science. 302 (5649): 1338–1339. doi:10.1126/science.1091721. PMID   14631022. S2CID   166476782.
  14. ↑ Porter, Eduardo (March 27, 2005). "Choice Is Good. Yes, No or Maybe?". The New York Times . Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  15. ↑ "Looking for Sound Financial Advice? Look to Psychology". APA Online; Psychology Matters. American Psychological Association. February 19, 2004. Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  16. ↑ Thaler, Richard (September 27, 2009). "Opting in vs. Opting Out". The New York Times. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
  17. ↑ Goldstein, DanielG.; Eric J. Johnson; William F.Sharpe (2008). "Choosing OutcomesVersus Choosing Products: Consumer-Focused Retirement Investment Advice". Journal of Consumer Research. 35 (3): 440–456. doi:10.1086/589562. S2CID   10083583.
  18. ↑ Sharpe, William F.; Daniel G. Goldstein; Philip W. Blythe (October 10, 2000). "The Distribution Builder: A Tool for Inferring Investor Preferences". Archived from the original on October 15, 2007. Retrieved 2008-02-27.
  19. ↑ "Distribution Builder Video" . Retrieved February 27, 2008.
  20. ↑ Hershfield, H.; Goldstein, D. G.; Sharpe, W. F.; Fox, J.; Yeykelis, L.; Carstensen, L. L.; Bailenson, J. N. (2011). "Increasing saving behavior through age-progressed renderings of the future self". Journal of Marketing Research. 48 (SPL): S23–S37. doi:10.1509/jmkr.48.SPL.S23. PMC   3949005 . PMID   24634544.
  21. ↑ "Society for Judgment and Decision Making".

Selected publications (listed chronologically)

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