RESEARCH
Areas of Expertise
- Social cognition, judgment, and decision
making
- Metacognitive processes underlying
heuristics and
biases, and debiasing decisions
- Judgments and decisions over time in
individuals, groups,
and organizations
Research Description
How do people make decisions? When are people biased in their
decisions? How can we help people to make better decisions?
To address these and related questions, Dr. Sanna’s program of
research examines social cognition,
judgment, and decision making in
individuals, groups, and organizations. He is particularly
interested in how people’s thoughts and feelings can lead to biases in
decisions, as well as in making decisions more accurate
(debiasing).
Several research projects address how the social context and the role
of time can affect people’s decision making. This most generally involves
judgments of the past, present, and future. For example, Dr.
Sanna studies how and why people engage in mental simulations
and
other imaginative thoughts, such as prefactual
(“what may be”) and counterfactual (“what might have been”)
thinking. Dr. Sanna also studies metacognitive influences on
judgments and decisions, including how subjective feelings of ease,
fluency, or emotions can influence the conclusions that people draw
from what they are thinking about. His research additionally
focuses on the
interactions
between prospective and retrospective cognitive (e.g., expectancies,
predictions) and
affective (e.g., moods, emotions) influences on people’s performances,
choices, and
decisions. Dr. Sanna’s research has broad implications and is applied to a
wide
variety
of judgments and decisions of individuals, groups, and organizations,
including forecasting, planning, and hindsight, with the ultimate goal
of helping people to make better decisions.
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