President Barack Obama highlighted the importance of using decision sciences insights to better serve the American people in an Executive Order issued Sept. 15, 2015. These same themes permeate the research of the College of Arts and Sciences Decision Sciences Collaborative (DSC), an interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers focused on the science of decision making.

Peters studies the basic building blocks of human judgment and decision making. Her research has shown that harnessing the power of our thoughts and feelings can help decision makers make better choices. In one study, for example, she and her colleagues designed a decision aid to help rheumatoid arthritis patients make informed choices about their medication that were consistent with their values. Use of the decision aid almost doubled value-consistent decisions.

Peters was also recently charged by the U.S. Institute of Medicine to examine how and why math ability matters to the success of patients eligible for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and how health care providers can best communicate information to patients so that more of them will be successful in making informed health and health-related decisions and maximizing their health and wellbeing. 

“The new White House Executive Order will help decision scientists break down barriers to improving public welfare,” noted Peters.

Katie Baldiga Coffman, assistant professor, economics and a DSC affiliate, has shown that penalizing wrong answers on a standardized tests, such as the SAT, disproportionally hurts women and other test takers who are more reluctant to guess. Removing the penalty — a change that was announced for the SAT I in spring 2014 — eliminates this source of bias.

Self-control and dieting are the focus of Psychology Professor Ken Fujita’s research. According to Fujita, food choices represent a difficult self-control dilemma for dieters.

“We show that presenting foods in verbal rather than in pictures promotes dieters' sensitivity to weight-loss concerns, and promotes more negative evaluations of desserts relative to vegetables,” said Fujita. “This suggests that presenting food choices as words rather than pictures may help dieters make more healthy and diet-consistent decisions.”

Similar to Fujita’s work, Robyn Wilson, associate professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources and a DSC affiliate, works with farmers who must balance short-term goals related to profit with long-term goals related to sustainability.  Wilson says that “Carefully assessing the behavioral responses of individuals to different policies is critical due to the complexity of human decision making and the potential for unintended consequences resulting from well-intentioned policy.”

Reducing budget deficits raises questions about the impact of legislators bargaining about cuts versus increases in government spending.  John Kagel, DSC faculty affiliate and professor of economics, conducted experiments demonstrating that bargaining about cuts produced longer delays in reaching agreement than did bargaining about spending increases. According to Kagel, this provides a partial explanation for the increased contentiousness between political parties in the US Congress and in the European Union. Policy suggestions are offered for how to overcome these effects. 

The Decision Sciences Collaborative consists of researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences (communication, economics, geography, history,  philosophy, political science and psychology); business; education and human ecology; engineering; environment and natural resources; law, medicine;  nursing; public health and public policy.

In addition to Peters, the leadership team of the Decision Sciences Collaborative includes Katie Baldiga Coffman, assistant professor, economics; Alison Norris, assistant professor, College of Public Health and College of Medicine; Amanda Robinson, assistant professor, political science; Robert Smith, assistant professor, Fisher College of Business; and Robyn Wilson, associate professor, School of Environmental and Natural Resources.

If you are interested in learning more about the impact of decision sciences research at Ohio State, in becoming a member, or in finding out more about the Decision Sciences Collaborative activities in their monthly mailing list, please contact Director Ellen Peters or visit the DSC website.