Barbara Mellers

Barbara Mellers is a psychologist who studies how people make judgments and decisions. She models how people make decisions when their choices deviate from normative principles. People are influenced by the context (surrounding stimuli) and the response mode (how the question is asked), but those factors are rarely considered in normative models. People have strong intuitions about fairness and cooperation that run counter to principles of self-interest. People anticipate emotional reactions to the outcomes of risky choices that depend on factors not considered in expected utility models. Those factors include the chance that an outcome will occur and “what if” outcomes that might have happened if the decision maker had selected a different option, just to name a few. In the last decade, Mellers has focused primarily on how to improve judgments and decisions in individuals and groups. She was co-PI of the Good Judgment Project that demonstrated how “superforecasters” could learn to make extraordinarily accurate predictions given feedback, training and environments conducive to learning. Mellers has published numerous articles in journals such as Perspectives on Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Management Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and the International Journal of Forecasting.