Stephen Broomell

Areas of Expertise

• Judgment and decision making
• Information environments
• Information aggregation
• Forecasting
• Methodology
• Risk perception and communication

HHS Signature Research Area(s)

• Sustainable Organizations and Thriving Communities

Department of Psychological Sciences Research Area(s)

• Cognitive Psychology
• Mathematical and Computational Psychology

Biography

I study judgment and decision making under uncertainty. More specifically, my research explores how the environment shapes human judgment and choice. I use a combination of lab experiments, quantitative analysis, and simulations to study three key areas:

Psychological Theory of Judgment and Choice.

My research focuses on variable experiences that exist in the world and posits theories that can explain how these experiences affect judgment accuracy and confidence.

The Role of Scientific Evidence in Judgment and Choice.

My research investigates the intersection between scientific evidence and everyday experiences to guide our understanding of public perceptions of scientific uncertainty, the communication of uncertain scientific results, and the role of expert judgment in public policy.

Advancing Methodology for Studying Judgment and Choice.

My research has developed several novel statistical approaches for modeling judgments, choices, and information aggregation.

Recruiting graduate students for Fall 2025 admission.

Education

• PhD, 2010, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Websites

• Global Risk and Individual Decisions Laboratory

Current Courses

• PSY 392 - Judgment and Decision Making

Selected Publications

• Broomell, S. B. & Kane, P. B. (2021). Perceiving a Pandemic: Global-local Incompatibility and COVID-19 Superspreading Events. Decision, 8(4), 227-236. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000155
• Smithson, M. & Broomell, S. B. (2022). Compositional Data Analysis Tutorial. Psychological Methods. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000464
• Broomell, S. B. (2020). Global-Local Incompatibility: The Misperception of Reliability in Judgment Regarding Global Variables. Cognitive Science, 44(4), e12831. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12831
• Broomell, S. B., Wong-Parodi, G., Morss, R., & Demuth, J. (2020). Do We Know Our Own Tornado Season? A Psychological Investigation of Tornado Risk Perception in the Southeast U.S. Weather, Climate, and Society, 12(4), 771-788. https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-20-0030.1
• Kane, P. B. & Broomell, S. B. (2020). Applications of the Bias-Variance Decomposition to Human Forecasting. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 98, 102417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmp.2020.102417