Faculty & Research

Print Print Bio

Reid Hastie

Robert S. Hamada Professor of Behavioral Science

Phone:
(773) 834-9167
Email:
reid.hastie@chicagobooth.edu
Address:
5807 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637

Reid Hastie studies judgment and decision making (managerial, legal, medical, engineering, and personal), memory and cognition, and social psychology. He is best known for his research on legal decision making and on social memory and judgment processes. Hastie is currently studying the role of explanations in inductive judgments, civil jury decision-making, and decision making competencies across the adult lifespan.

Hastie has written a textbook, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, in collaboration with Robyn Dawes of Carnegie Mellon University, and an Annual Review of Psychology chapter, "Problems for Judgment and Decision Making." He is involved with the Center for Decision Research at Chicago Booth.

He has taught at Harvard University, Northwestern University, and the University of Colorado where he was director of the Center for Research and Judgment Policy.

Hastie has served on review panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Research Council, and on 16 professional journal editorial boards. His research was funded continuously by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health from 1975 to 2005. He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals, including Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Hastie earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Stanford University in 1968, a master's degree in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego in 1970, and a PhD in Psychology from Yale University in 1973. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2001.

Selected Publications

With N. Pennington, "Explanation-based decision making," in T. Connolly, H. R. Arkes, and K. R. Hammond, eds., Judgment and Decision Making: An Interdisciplinary Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

"Problems for judgment and decision making," Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 52 (2001).

With R.M. Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (California: Sage Publishers, 2001).

With T. Kameda, "The robust beauty of majority rules," Psychological Review (2005).

With A.G. Sanfey, "The neuroscience of decision making," in E.E. Smith and S.M. Kosslyn, eds., Cognition: Mind and Brain (New York: Prentice Hall, 2006).

For a listing of research publications please visit Reid Hastie’s university library listing page.

New: Garbage in, Garbage Out? Some Micro Sources of Macro Errors
Date Posted: Nov  28, 2012
Many institutions, large or small, make their decisions through some process of deliberation. Nonetheless, deliberating institutions often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures; all of them have implication for large-scale institutions as well as small ones. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of an institution’s members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a re

New: Democracy Under Uncertainty: The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ and the Free-Rider Problem in Group Decision Mak
Date Posted: Sep  16, 2010
We introduce a game theory model of individual decisions to cooperate by contributing personal resources to group decisions versus by free-riding on the contributions of other members. In contrast to most public-goods games that assume group returns are linear in individual contributions, the present model assumes decreasing marginal group production as a function of aggregate individual contributions. This diminishing marginal returns assumption is more realistic and generates starkly different

New: What’s Next? Judging Sequences of Binary Events
Date Posted: Feb  20, 2010
The authors review research on judgments of random and nonrandom sequences involving binary events with a focus on studies documenting gambler’s fallacy and hot hand beliefs. The domains of judgment include random devices, births, lotteries, sports performances, stock prices, and others. After discussing existing theories of sequence judgments, the authors conclude that in many everyday settings people have naive complex models of the mechanisms they believe generate observed events, and they re

New: Perceived Causality as a Cue to Temporal Distance
Date Posted: Nov  30, 2009
The three experiments reported show that judgments of elapsed time between events depend on perceived causal relations between the events. Participants judged pairs of causally related events to occur closer together in time than pairs of causally unrelated events that were separated by the same actual time interval. The causality-time relationship was first demonstrated for time judgments about historical events. Causally related events were judged to be significantly closer together in time th

New: Introduction to the Special Issue: Decision Making and the Law
Date Posted: Oct  12, 2009
Legal decision making is different from other types of decision making in several ways. For example, the decision makers range from highly qualified and trained professionals such as judges, making repeated decisions alone to novices such as jurors, making one off decisions in groups. Pertinent information may be unavailable to the decision maker, and he/she is also unlikely to receive much feedback about the quality of a decision. However, legal decision makers rarely suffer any consequences fo

REVISION: Decision and Experience: Why Don't We Choose What Makes Us Happy?
Date Posted: Nov  10, 2008
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among psychologists and other social scientists in subjective wellbeing and happiness. Here we review selected contributions to this development from the literature on behavioral decision theory. In particular, we examine many, somewhat surprising, findings that show people systematically fail to predict or choose what maximizes their happiness, and we look at reasons why they fail to do so. These findings challenge a fundamental assumption that und

New: Effects of Amount of Information on Judgment Accuracy and Confidence
Date Posted: Nov  10, 2008
When a person evaluates his or her confidence in a judgment, what is the effect of receiving more judgment-relevant information? We report three studies that show when judges receive more information, their confidence increases more than their accuracy, producing substantial confidence-accuracy discrepancies. Our results suggest that judges do not adjust for the cognitive limitations that reduce their ability to use additional information effectively. We place these findings in a more general fr

REVISION: Hedonomics: Bridging Decision Research with Happiness Research
Date Posted: Nov  03, 2008
One way to increase happiness is to increase the objective levels of external outcomes; another is to improve the presentation and choices among external outcomes without increasing their objective levels. Economists focus on the 1st method. We advocate the second, which we call hedonomics. Hedonomics studies (a) relationships between presentations (how a given set of mfoutcomes are arranged among themselves or relative to other outcomes) and happiness and (b) relationships between choice (which

New: Four Failures of Deliberating Groups
Date Posted: Apr  18, 2008
Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim t

New: Calibration Trumps Confidence as a Basis for Witness Credibility
Date Posted: Apr  09, 2007
In the courtroom and in laboratory studies, confident witnesses are viewed as more credible, and thus have more influence on judgments and verdicts, than unconfident witnesses. In two experiments (with college student subjects) we demonstrate that erroneous testimony may damage the credibility of a high-confidence witness more than a low-confidence one. We show that listeners rely on a source's calibration - whether the source's confidence is appropriate to the level of knowledge - rather than

New: What Happened on Deliberation Day?
Date Posted: Jun  26, 2006
What are the effects of deliberation about political issues? This essay reports the results of a kind of Deliberation Day, involving sixty-three citizens in Colorado. Groups from Boulder, a predominantly liberal city, met and discussed global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples; groups from Colorado Springs, a predominately conservative city, met to discuss the same issues. The major effect of deliberation was to make group members more extreme than they were when

Courses

Number Name Quarter
38002 Managerial Decision Making 2013 (Spring)
38913 Foundations of Judgment and Decision Making 2012 (Fall)

Research Activities

Judgment and decision making (managerial, legal, medical, engineering, and personal), the neural substrates of decision processes, memory and cognition, and social psychology. Some currently active research topics include: the impact of rumors and "news" on stock market forecasts; the role of explanations in category concept representations (including the effects on category classification, deductive and inductive inferences); civil jury decision making; neural and physiological substrates of risky decision making; and the psychology of reading statistical graphs and maps.