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RESEARCH |
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EXPERTISE
How do people make decisions? When are people biased in their decisions? How can we help people to make better decisions? Dr. Sanna and his laboratory members study social cognition, judgment, and decision making in individuals, groups, and organizations. This includes how people’s thoughts and feelings can lead to biases in decisions, as well as make decisions more accurate (debiasing). Several interrelated lines of research address how intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intertemporal factors affect people’s judgments, choices, and decisions. For example, one area of investigation examines people’s use of mental simulations; that is, thoughts not only about “what is” in actuality but also about “what may be” (prefactual thoughts) and “what might have been” (counterfactual thoughts). Other research focuses on the role of metacognitive influences on judgments and decisions, including how ease of recall, fluency of information processing, or emotions can influence the conclusions that people draw from what they are thinking about. Still other research examines prospective and retrospective cognitive (e.g., expectancies, predictions) and affective (e.g., moods, emotions) influences on people’s performances, cooperative choices, and reciprocity decisions. The programatic research advanced by Dr. Sanna and his laboratory members has broad interdisciplinary implications and is applied to a wide variety of judgments and decisions of individuals, groups, and organizations, with the ultimate goal of helping people to make better decisions. Home |