Assistant Professor
BS (Northwestern), PhD (Yale)
Decision, Inference, and Cognitive Economics (DICE) Lab
I am accepting graduate students for the next application cycle
Research Interests
I direct the Decision, Inference, and Cognitive Economics (DICE) Lab, which works at the intersection of cognitive science and behavioural science. We use experiments and modeling to understand both basic cognitive mechanisms underpinning thought and choice, as well as how these mechanisms scale up into social interactions and institutions like markets and governments.
Some of our lab’s current research looks at:
- How we remember and select which tasks to complete
- The role of sense-making and imagination in making decisions under uncertainty and over time
- How we think about causal and analogical relationships, and how such representations govern our predictions and choices
- How our moral judgments of others and our own morally-laden decisions are inter-related
- The role of mental models and moral judgment in shaping social, economic, and political institutions
Representative Publications
- Dawson, C., & Johnson, S.G.B. (working paper). Dread aversion and economic preferences.
- Johnson, S.G.B., Bilovich, A., & Tuckett, D. (in press). Conviction narrative theory: A theory of choice under radical uncertainty. Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
- Johnson, S.G.B., Zhang, J., & Keil, F.C. (2022). Win–win denial: The psychological underpinnings of zero-sum thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151, 455–474.
- Johnson, S.G.B., & Ahn, J. (2021). Principles of moral accounting: How our intuitive moral sense balances rights and wrongs. Cognition, 206, 104467.
- Johnson, S.G.B., Merchant, T., & Keil, F.C. (2020). Belief digitization: Do we treat uncertainty as probabilities or as bits? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149, 1417–1434.
- Johnson, S.G.B., & Steinerberger, S. (2019). Intuitions about mathematical beauty: A case study in the aesthetic experience of ideas. Cognition, 189, 242–259.