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Posted on Saturday, Jun 05 2021
Markus Steiner, Florian Seitz, and I have a new paper in which we investigate the cognitive processes underlying people's self-reports of their risk preferences. Specifically, we were interested in the information-integration processes that people may rely on during judgment formation, with a particular focus on the type of evidence people may consider when rendering their self-reports. In doing so, we aimed to contribute to a better understanding of why self-reports typically achieve high degrees of convergent validity and test-retest reliability, thus often outperforming their behavioral counterparts (i.e., monetary lotteries and other lab tasks).Steiner, M., Seitz, F., & Frey, R. (2021). Through the window of my mind: Mapping information integration and the cognitive representations underlying self-reported risk preference. Decision, 8, 97–122. doi:10.1037/dec0000127 | PDF
Posted on Friday, Apr 30 2021
A large body of research has documented the relatively poor psychometric properties of behavioral measures of risk taking, such as low convergent validity and poor test–retest reliability. In this project we examined the extent to which these issues may be related to violations of "representative design" – the idea that experimental stimuli should be sampled or designed such that they represent the environments to which measured constructs are supposed to generalize.Steiner, M., & Frey, R. (2021). Representative design in psychological assessment: A case study using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150, 2117-2136. doi:10.1037/xge0001036 | PDF
Posted on Friday, Nov 27 2020
Great news from the Swiss National Science Foundation: I was awarded an Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship for my project entitled "Decision making in a complex world: Towards a process-level theory of risk taking" (details about the project will soon appear online). I am super excited about this opportunity and look forward to joining the University of Zurich as an assistant professor next year.Posted on Friday, Nov 27 2020
Even more good news in addition to the approval of my SNSF Eccellenca Professorial Fellowship (see blog post above): Today was the (virtual) dies academicus, and the University of Basel announced online that I will receive the Amerbach Prize 2020 for my work on individual differences in decision making under risk and uncertainty!Posted on Thursday, Nov 05 2020
This week I was invited to give a talk at a dialogue event on 5G, organized by the Risk Center of the ETH Zurich. 5G is the latest generation of mobile communications technology, and its recent deployment in countries around the world has triggered fierce public debates. At the dialogue event, I presented a project in which I modeled inter- and intraindividual differences in people's risk perceptions of this technology, as well as how people's risk perceptions of 5G are associated with their policy-related attitudes. The presentation was recorded and if you are interested, please have a look below.