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

Recruiting graduate students for Fall 2024 admission

I study judgment and decision making under uncertainty. I have found that there are many contexts where observations (scientific or intuitive) provide far less information than is realized because of veiled violations of assumptions. My research approach is to formalize this disconnect by recasting such observations as measurements, and using psychometric theory to identify what assumptions are likely to hold, and highlighting the problematic role of violated assumptions for judgment, inference, and choice. Any investigation of judgment and choice under uncertainty will require robust methodology that can account for such disconnects between observation and theory. Failure to account for this problem will lead to inaccurate inferences from observation, for both researchers and DMs.

Education

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

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