Doctoral students
Shoham Choshen-Hillel
Phone:
02-5883044
Fax:
02-5881373
Email:
shohac@mscc.huji.ac.il
Visiting hour: Thursday, 11:00-12:00, Room: 3508
Instructor: Prof. Ilan Yaniv
Research:
Judgment and decision making, social preference, altruism
Teaching:
Theory of testing
General
Social preference and decision making
My main line of research focuses on social utility, internal reward and decision making. Specifically, togehter with my advisor Prof. Ilan Yaniv, I study social preferences - decision makers' satisfaction with their own and others' outcomes.We argue that a characteristic of the decision setting – an individual's role in creating the outcomes, referred to as agency – critically affects decision makers' weighting of opposing social motives. Namely, in settings where people can merely judge the outcomes, but cannot affect them ("low agency”), their concern with inequality figures prominently. In contrast, in settings where people determine the outcomes for themselves and others ("high-agency”), their concern with the welfare of others is prominent.
Read our paper on this topic - winner of the 2011 De Finetti Prize of the European Association for Decision Making, and runner up for the "Einhorn New Investigator Award” of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, 2011:
Choshen-Hillel, S. & Yaniv, I. (2011). Agency and the construction of social preference: Between inequality aversion and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,101 (6), 1253–1261.
Choshen-Hillel, S., & Yaniv, I. (2012). Social preferences shaped by conflicting motives: When enhancing social welfare creates unfavorable comparisons for the self. Judgment and Decision Making, 7, 618–627.
Watch the prize talk given in London.
Read:
An interview about this work at the EADM website.
An atricle at Psychology Today by Art Markman about this research, 2012.
An article at "The Marker" - Haaretz, by Hila Weissberg, 2.2.2012 (Hebrew).
An article at "Galileo" Science Journal, February 2012 (Hebrew).
The Hebrew University's announcement on this research, March 2012 (Hebrew).
Advice taking
Another main interest of mine is opinion revision processes and advice-taking behaviors. We study how individuals should use others' opionions - and what they actually do.
Read our papers on this topic:
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Yaniv, I. & Choshen-Hillel (2012). Exploiting the wisdom of others to make better decisions: Suspending judgment reduces egocentrism and increases accuracy. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 25 , 427-434.
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Yaniv, I., Choshen-Hillel, S. & Milyavsky, M. (2011). Receiving advice on matters of taste: Similarity, majority influence, and taste discrimination. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 115, 111-120.
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Yaniv, I., Choshen-Hillel, S. & Milyavsky, M. (2009). Spurious consensus and opinion revision: Why might people be more confident in their less accurate judgments? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 558-563.
- Yaniv, I. & Choshen-Hillel, S. (2012). When guessing what another person would say is better than giving your own opinion: Using perspective-taking to improve advice-taking. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 1022-1028.
See reactions to this paper: Article by Daniel Rettig
Psychometrics
I'm interested in psychometrics and testing issues. I teach the course "Theory of testing" at the Hebrew University, together with Dr. Anat Ben-Simon, and have been working at the National Institute for Testing and Evaluation.
PhD group
I initiated a PhD group that studies cognitive and social psychology together.
We're now also organizing a national PhD conference on social psychology.
History of Psychology
Ilan Yaniv and I have been interested in the history of the psychology department.
We conducted numerous interviews and went through old documents at the Hebrew University's archive.
Here is what we found:
Article in "Etmol" Journal by Yad Ben Zvi (in Hebrew).
The Charming Lab
Visit our lab's site (Prof. Ilan Yaniv's decision making lab).
View some pictures from our "Charming Lab".