Elke Weber, PhD│CHIBE Research Seminar

Speaker(s)

• 
  Elke U. Weber, PhD, MA — Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

Event Description

Registration is required to attend this virtual seminar. To register, please visit: https://upenn.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5Hcvv5B9RHCLjXLX57elGg.

“Query Theory: A Process Account of Preference Construction.”

Many psychologists and behavioral economists agree that many of our preferences are constructed, rather than innate or pre-computed and stored. Little research, however, has explored the implications that established facts about human attention and memory have when people marshal evidence for their decisions.  This talk reviews query theory, a psychological process model of preference construction, and uses it to explain a range of phenomena in intertemporal choice, including our impatience when we are asked to delay consumption, applied to both clinical and normal populations.  Behavioral data, meta-analyzed across multiple contexts and studies, provide support for query theory’s assumptions about the processes underlying intertemporal preference construction and attribute labeling.

Elke Weber is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and professor of psychology and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Weber’s specialty is judgment and decision-making under risk and uncertainty. Her research has investigated psychologically appropriate ways to measure and model individual and cultural differences in risk-taking, specifically in risky financial situations and environmental decision-making and policy. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Organizer(s)