My current research programs are organized into four categories: (1) Accountability. This research explores the wide range of strategies people use to cope with social pressures to justify their views or conduct to others. Work to date examines such strategies as attitude shifting/ingratiation, pre-emptive self-criticism, defensive bolstering, decision evasion (buckpassing, procrastination, and obfuscation), protest against "unreasonable" standards, justifications, excuses, and apologies for disappointing conduct, exploitation of loopholes in performance evaluation systems (cheating), exercising the exit option, and loyalty. Several studies now shed light on the conditions under which these strategies are likely to be activated as well as the implications of strategies for judgmental biases (in particular, work on pre-emptive self-criticism, defensive bolstering, and decision evasion) and for interpersonal harmony and organizational performance.
(2) Value conflict/taboo trade-offs/protecting the sacred. This research explores the boundaries people often place on the range of the "thinkable." Examples include taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals. The guiding conceptual framework is the sacred-value-protection model which maintains that: (a) moral communities tend to treat certain values as sacred, as though (at least at a rhetorical level) the community has an unbounded or infinite commitment to the values that precludes trade-offs, compromise, or other mingling with secular values or considerations; (b) members in good standing in the moral community are supposed to direct the moral outrage at those who mix secular and sacred values considerations (and indeed are supposed to engage in meta-norm enforcement: to punish those who fail to punish); (c) members of the moral community who have merely witnessed the profanation of sacred values are also supposed to engage in moral cleansing to purify the self and to reaffirm solidarity with the normative order.
(3) The concept of good judgment. This line of work can itself be broken down into three subcategories: work on world politics, styles of reasoning in individuals and groups, and alternative functionalist metaphors for judgment. The work on world politics focuses on the costs and benefits of different styles of reasoning in that domain. This work draws heavily on expert judgment and deals largely with assessments of historical counterfactuals, the generation of conditional forecasts, and reactions to the confirmation or disconfirmation of conditional forecasts. The work on reasoning styles of individuals attempts to identify situations in which integratively simple versus complex styles of reasoning are especially likely to prove adaptive or maladaptive. The work on group processes uses the political and corporate versions of the Group Dynamics Q-sort to document the conditions under which various patterns of small group dynamics are likely to prove adaptive or maladaptive in decision making environments. The work on alternative functionalist metaphors explores how our judgments of judgmental biases and errors inevitably rest on assumptions about the goals people are trying to achieve by thinking, feeling, and acting as they do. What looks like an error when we posit that people are intuitive scientists (trying to understand the world) or intuitive economists (trying to maximize utility in competitive markets) may look quite defensible, even adaptive or appropriate when we posit that people are intuitive politicians (trying to maintain good relations with key constituencies or intuitive theologians (trying to protect sacred values against secular encroachments) or intuitive prosecutors (trying to deter violations of the normative order).
(4) Political versus politicized psychology: Are value neutrality and objectivity obsolete ideals? This series of articles identifies criteria that can be used to gauge the impact of moral and political objectives on psychological research programs that are ostensibly dedicated exclusively to the pursuit of the truth. Several articles also explore the difficulties of drawing sharp fact-value distinctions and the resulting threats that arise to the value-neutrality and objectivity of knowledge claims in behavioral and social science (with special reference to work on racial policy reasoning and on foreign policy preferences). Finally, a subset of articles goes beyond "cursing the darkness" to "lighting candles" -- to identifying conceptual and methodological strategies for checking creeping politicization. These strategies include turnabout thought experiments (that are often readily translatable into actual experiments in the laboratory or in representative-sample surveys), the development of Q-sort techniques for translating case studies into standardized data languages with common metrics, and adopting a posture of constructive ambiguity in evaluating styles of reasoning in individuals and groups (recognizing the ease with which partisans can affix negative or positive value spins to a given pattern of reasoning or to its opposite).
**AWARDS AND HONORS**
Grawemeyer World Order Prize, 2007
Woodrow Wilson Award for best book published on government, politics, or international affairs and Robert E. Lane Award for best book in political psychology, both from American Political Science Association in 2005, for "Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know?"
National Academy of Sciences Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of War, 1999
Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Political Psychology, International Society of Political Psychology, 1997.
Woodrow Wilson Book Award, American Political Science Association (co recipient with P. Sniderman & R. Brody, for Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology),1992.
American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research, 1988.
MacArthur Fellow in International Security and Conflict Resolution, 1987-1989; 1999-2001.
Fellow of Division 8 of the American Psychological Association, 1987.
Erik H. Erikson Award of the International Society of Political Psychology, 1987.
Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1987.
Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Social Psychology, American Psychological Association, 1986.
Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship, 1977 1979.
Yale University Fellowship, 1976 1977.
Governor General's Gold Medal, Award for Undergraduate Academic Excellence, 1975.
British Columbia Psychological Association Gold Medal, 1975.
**GRANTS AND CONTRACTS RECEIVED**
Kaufman Foundation, Cognitive biases and organizational correctives, 2005-2007.
U.S. Institute of Peace, Cognitive biases in political forecasting: The Korean peninsula, 2001-2003.
MacArthur Foundation, Good judgment in world politics, 2000-2001.
National Science Foundation, The impact of accountability on judgment and choice, 1995-1999.
Mershon Center, The Ohio State University, Good judgment in world politics: In search of an elusive construct, 1996-2000.
National Science Foundation, Prejudice and politics in the Netherland, 1996-1998 (Co-PI with P. Sniderman, Administered through Stanford).
National Science Foundation, Dynamics of political persuasion, 1992-1994 (Co-PI with P. M. Sniderman and H. Brady).
National Science Foundation, Race and political preference, 1988-1992 (Co-PI with P. M. Sniderman).
MacArthur Foundation, Cognitive perspectives on international conflict, 1987 1993.
Office of Leadership Analysis, Political group dynamics and leadership effectiveness. Period: 1987 1993.
Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Psychological dynamics of international conflict. Periods: July, 1982 June, 1985; July, 1986 June, 1987; July, 1988 June, 1993.
MacArthur Foundation, Behavioral and social science perspectives on nuclear war. Period: 1986 1988.
Social Science and Humanities Research Council, The status of civil liberties in Canada: A proposal to study citizen attitudes and policy reasoning. Period: 1986 1989. (With Paul Sniderman, Joseph Fletcher, and Peter Russell.)
Canadian Studies Faculty and Institutional Research Grant, Cognitive processes underlying public attitudes toward civil liberties, Canadian Embassy, 1986 1993.
National Institute of Mental Health, Accountability: The neglected social context of judgment and choice (RO1 MH39942). Period: 1985 1988.
National Institute of Mental Health, Determinants of self presentation (RO3 MH35907). Period: 1981 1983
Public Health Service, Biomedical Research Support Grant, Health care allocation decisions: Coping with difficult value trade offs. Period: 1981 1984; 1986 1990.
Instructional Improvement Grants, University of California, Support for undergraduate psychological research. Period: 1981 1983.
**EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERSHIPS SPANNING CAREER**
Annual Review of Psychology
Psychological Science
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition
International Studies Quarterly
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Political Psychology
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
**ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE**
Director, Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (renamed in 1992 as Institute of Personality and Social Research), University of California, Berkeley, 1988-1995
Group Chair, Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, 2002-present
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, 2003-2004.
Director, Ph.D. programs, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley