SUMMER STATISTICS AND METHODS COURSES 2017

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An important part of our stats education was Stephen Stigler’s lesson on the Quincunx

Alan Reifman maintains a list of summer statistics and methods courses that would be of interest to those looking to refresh or expand upon their skills.

Here is the list for 2017. Enjoy!

best,
Dan

Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine

CALL FOR PAPERS: SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITY, UTILITY AND DECISION MAKING (SPUDM)

Submission deadline: March 15th , 2017

The European Association for Decision Making invites submissions for presentations, posters and/or symposia for its 2017 Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM 26) Conference to be held at the Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, from Sunday August 20 to Thursday August 24, 2017.

All submissions must be made electronically.
Invited keynote speakers:
Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University, USA
Debora Estrin, Cornell Tech, USA
Ido Erev, Technion, Israel
Presidential Address by EADM president:
Andreas Glöckner, Göttingen University, Germany

The conference focus will combine traditional topics as well as new directions in Judgment and Decision Making research.

More details and submission guidelines are available on the conference website — https://spudm2017.net.technion.ac.il/call-for-papers/

For further assistance please contact the organizing committee at Spudm26@idc.ac.il<mailto:Spudm26@idc.ac.il>

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Haifa.

SPUDM 26 organizing committee:

* Shahar Ayal, IDC Herzelia
* David Budescu, Fordham University
* Ido Erev, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
* Andreas Glöckner, Göttingen University
* Ilana Ritov, Hebrew University
* Shaul Shalvi, University of Amsterdam
* Richárd Szántó, Corvinus University of Budapest

2017 FABBS AWARD WINNER FROM THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING

FABBS (Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences) just announced the 2017 Early Career Impact Award winners. This award is presented to early career scientists of FABBS member societies during the first 10 years post-PhD and recognizes scientists who have made major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior. The goal is to enhance public visibility of these sciences and the particular research through the dissemination efforts of the FABBS in collaboration with the member societies and award winners.

For the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, the 2017 winner is Edward Cokely of the University of Oklahoma.

Dr. Edward Cokely has made significant advances in the psychology of skilled decision making, with applications in risk communication and adaptive technology. He is known for his research on cognitive abilities and inclusive decision education. In addition, Dr. Cokely’s research has advanced frontiers in our scientific understanding of simple, effective decision aids, visual aids, and training programs including adaptive computerized tutors to improve high-stakes decision making among diverse and vulnerable individuals who vary widely in ability, proficiency, education, background, and country of residence.

A passage from one of his papers shows his conviction that people, regardless of background, can improve their decision making ability:

For more than a century people have used theoretical assumptions to argue that general intelligence constrains decision making quality, causing substantial differences in human potential and outcomes…[with implications for] the structure of our policies, rights, institutions, and welfare practices. […] Setting aside moral and ethical outrage, at the heart of the scientific issue is a basic question about whether or not abilities actually constrain decision quality. [Our] experiments, training programs, and cognitive process tracing studies provide converging causal evidence [that] skilled decision making generally does not require high-levels of fluid intelligence or special abstract reasoning capacities… [With the right support] nearly anyone has the ability to make well-informed and skilled decisions so long as they understand risks.

In his writings, Dr. Cokely discusses how these findings present both research opportunities and substantial scientific responsibilities (for example, all else equal, informed decision making is an ethical imperative). This foundation serves as the scientific and ethical basis for his efforts to nurture risk literacy and support science for informed decision making.

In fewer than ten years after earning his PhD, Dr. Cokely has published over 60 papers which have been cited over 2,000 times. In the same time period, he has mentored 10 PhD students and secured more than $2,000,000 dollars in funding for research and student support. His research has been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other media outlets such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Online. He’s received several major awards including a 2013 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the APA’s Award for Best Research Paper in Applied Experimental Psychology (2012).

Dr. Cokely has developed the Berlin Numeracy Tests and associated outreach efforts via www.RiskLiteracy.org, a multinational collaborative informed decision making project. Today, more than 100,000 people from 166 countries have taken one of the Berlin Numeracy Tests. Hundreds of recent studies by research groups from business, psychology, economics, political science, law, medicine, social work, forestry, and other fields have published decision making research using the Berlin Numeracy Tests, improving our understanding of the needs and processes of diverse decision makers in more than 50 countries.

Dr. Cokely serves as Presidential Research Professor and Associate Professor of Psychology, and co-founding faculty of the National Institute for Risk & Resilience, at the University of Oklahoma and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development after earning his doctorate in psychology from Florida State University.

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

The quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

Dan Goldstein
SJDM Newsletter Editor

DEADLINE THIS FRIDAY NOVEMBER 18, 2016

FABBS (Federation of Associations in Brain and Behavioral Sciences) is a coalition of scientific societies that share an interest in advancing the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior.

To recognize scientists who have made outstanding research contributions, FABBS grants early career impact awards. (Here early means within 10 years of receiving a PhD.)

Awards are rotated tri-annually among various subsets of societies that are members of this larger federation.

In 2017, the subset includes the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM).

Accordingly, we are seeking nominations for the FABBS early career impact award.

If you wish to recognize the contributions of a judgment and decision making (JDM) scholar who obtained their PhD in the last 10 years, please email the name of your nominee to Shane Frederick (shane.frederick at yale.edu) by this Friday, November 18th, 2016.

The SJDM executive board will review the set of nominees and make our recommendation to FABBS by November 30, 2016.

Those seeking more information about this award can obtain it here:

http://www.fabbs.org/fabbs-foundation/early-career-investigator-award/

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING CONFERENCE STARTS FRI NOV 18, 2016

What: SJDM 2016 Conference
When: November 18 to 21, 2016
Where: Sheraton Boston Hotel, 39 Dalton St, Boston, MA 02199
Special Features
* Plenary address by Linda Babcock
* Tribute to Baruch Fischhoff
* Presidential address by Dan Goldstein
* Women in JDM networking event
* Einhorn Award revelation
* Social event at a swank speakeasy

As the Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference is right around the corner, it’s time to make your last minute travel and hotel arrangements if you haven’t already. There have been quite a few early online registrations, and total registrations are expected to number around 675. It’s too late to register online, but you can do so in person at the conference (which 15% to 20% of people do). At $400 onsite for members ($200 for student members), it’s one of the least expensive conferences around. It would be cheaper than that but, you know, Boston. If you aren’t a member, you can join here for $50.

You can download the current copy of the program here. As you know, the talks were selected by a representative panel of reviewers this year and we see many amazing talks and posters on the program.

See you soon in Boston!

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING NEWSLETTER

The quarterly Society for Judgment and Decision Making newsletter can be downloaded from the SJDM site:

http://sjdm.org/newsletters/

best,
Dan Goldstein
SJDM President & Newsletter Editor

SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING (SJDM) 2016

ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING, NOVEMBER 18-21, 2016

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) invites abstracts for oral presentations and posters on any interesting topic related to judgment and decision making. Completed manuscripts are not required.

LOCATION, DATES, AND PROGRAM

SJDM’s annual conference will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, November 18-21, 2016. The conference will take place at the Sheraton Boston. Plenary events will include a keynote talk on Sunday, November 20th delivered by Linda Babcock.

SUBMISSIONS: DEADLINE JUNE 20, 2016

The deadline for submissions is June 20, 2016, end of the day. Submissions for symposia, oral presentations, and posters should be made through the SJDM website at http://www.sjdm.org/abstract-review/htdocs Technical questions can be addressed to the webmaster, Jon Baron, at webmaster@sjdm.org. All other questions can be addressed to the program chair, Nina Mazar, at nina.mazar@utoronto.ca.

ELIGIBILITY

At least one author of each presentation must be a member of SJDM. Joining at the time of submission will satisfy this requirement. You may join SJDM at http://www.sjdm.org/join.html. An individual may give only one talk and present only one poster, but may be a co-author on multiple talks and/or posters. Please note that both the membership rule and the one-talk/one-poster rule will be strictly enforced.

NOTE FOR NON-US CITIZENS REQUIRING VISAS

Travelers from certain countries may need extra lead time to obtain travel documents. Although we are unable to accept talks early, we can provide notification of an “accepted presentation.” This means that you would at least be guaranteed a poster. We can do this because posters are typically evaluated only for content and most are accepted. If you submit a talk, you will receive a notice of an accepted presentation immediately, and a decision on your talk at the usual time. To take advantage of this option, you should still submit through the regular process, and also send a request to the program chair, Nina Mazar, at nina.mazar@utoronto.ca.

AWARDS

The Best Student Poster Award is given for the best poster presentation whose first author is a student member of SJDM.

The Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award is intended to encourage outstanding work by new researchers. Applications are due June 19, 2016. Further details are available at http://www.sjdm.org/awards/einhorn.html. Questions can be directed to Neil Stewart, neil.stewart@warwick.ac.uk.

The Jane Beattie Memorial Fund subsidizes travel to North America for a foreign scholar in pursuits related to judgment and decision research, including attendance at the annual SJDM meeting. Further details will be available at http://www.sjdm.org/awards/beattie.html.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Nina Mazar (Chair), Katy Milkman, Suzanne Shu, Ana Franco-Watkins, Thorsten Pachur, Meng Li, Bettina von Helversen, Oleg Urminsky, and Kate Wessels (conference coordinator)

MAKING SURE THE REVIEWERS REFLECT THE MEMBERSHIP

Click to enlarge

Perhaps because it is an election year in the US, we’ve been thinking a lot about proportional representation.

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) is a diverse academic society, with people coming from about seven academic fields (or groups of related fields). See above.

Nina Mazar (SJDM Program Committee Chair) and Dan Goldstein (SJDM President) have been thinking about the following question: What can we do to help assure the papers accepted to the SJDM conference reflect the interests of the membership?

This lead to the “representative reviewer project”. Based on the membership chart above and a simple R script, we tested candidate sets of reviewers to see how well they matched the interests of the society. We tweaked the set of reviewers until we got as close as we could to proportional representation of fields.

We’ve sent out invitations to a representative set of reviewers. If you’ve been invited, please say “yes”. You’re representing a whole category of researcher.

We keep saying “representative”, but one might ask “representative of what?” The survey of the membership just includes faculty (as opposed to students members) who have paid dues in the last three years. So it’s a bit backward looking, which is okay. If the society is going to change focus, it should do so slowly. We at the Decision Science News feel that the Society for Judgment and Decision Making should be about judgment and decision making. If one is not careful, the field can run away from it’s name, like how the field of social psychology is no longer about social psychology.

ANALYSIS OF THE SJDM (SOCIETY FOR JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING) MEMBERSHIP

In order to make sure that decisions made for the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) reflect the membership of the Society, we wanted to see some stats about the membership. Unfortunately, good stats on the members don’t exist. Sure, we did some crude analyses a while back, mostly about geography. However, this time we we wanted more precise information about gender balance and academic disciplines. So, we undertook an analysis. This was a lot of work. Please see the end for the methods. But first, graphs!

Gender overall

Count in all subfields

Click to enlarge

Count in major subfields. In this figure:

• Psych comprises Cognitive Psych, Social Psych and Psych (Other)
• Business comprises Marketing, Org Behavior, and Econ

Click to enlarge

Fields within gender

Click to enlarge

Methods

• Started with the member database
• Excluded people who haven’t paid dues since 2012
• Excluded student members
• Excluded members who didn’t specify an institution in their profiles

This left 695 names. We then:

• Went person by person through the list and looked them up online
• Coded each person’s gender. We couldn’t determine it 5 times and coded it as NA
• Coded each person’s academic field. If we couldn’t determine the field, usually because a lack of a CV, we coded it as NA. If the person worked in industry, we coded it as NA. There were 67 NAs for field overall.

This took about 10 hours, mostly done after dinner, in front of the television.

We coded things in the following way:

• People working in Marketing departments were classified as Marketing
• People working in Management or Organizational Behavior departments were classified as Org Behavior
• People who had mostly Cognitive Psych or Cognitive Science publications were classified as Cognitive Psych
• People who had mostly Social Psych publications were classified as Social Psych
• People working in Neuroscience, Developmental Psych, and other kinds of psych were classified as Psych (Other)
• People with a wide variety of psych publications were classified as Psych (Other)
• People in Econ, Accounting, Finance, and OR were classified as Econ, Acct, Fin, OR
• People in Policy, Law, and Medicine were classified as Policy, Law, Med

ADDENDUM

Mark Horowitz made a “Tree Map” from the data and sent it in. Thanks!