- Jonathan Baron
Jonathan Baron is a Professor of
Psychology [http://psych.upenn.edu/index.php] at theUniversity of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making.Biography
Jonathan Baron was born in
Boston ,Massachusetts , in 1944, and received a B.A. from Harvard in 1966 and a Ph.D. from Michigan in 1970, both in psychology. He married Judith Baron in 1967, and has one son, David, born in 1980.Baron is the founding editor of the journal "Judgment and Decision Making" [http://journal.sjdm.org/] and has been on the editorial boards of several other journals.He is a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science and of theAssociation for Psychological Science , and was the President of theSociety for Judgment and Decision Making for 2006-2007 [http://www.sjdm.org/sjdm-history.shtml#officers] .Notable contributions
Baron's work has occurred primarily within the field of
judgment anddecision making , a multi-disciplinary area that appliespsychology to problems ineconomics ,law ,business , andpublic policy . This field began by contrasting human decision behavior to theories of individual decision making and judgment such asprobability theory andexpected utility . Baron's research has extended the focus of judgment and decision making to social problems of resource allocation and ethical decisions. Among the concepts associated with his work areomission bias (the tendency for people to excuse acts of omission more easily than acts of commission) andprotected values (principles on which people are unwilling to accept tradeoffs).Baron is author of "Thinking and Deciding" [http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521659728] , a text that takes on the task of examining psychological research directed at a comprehension of the nature of thinking as he sees it. In this text, Baron covers such topics as
risk ,bioethics ,Bayes' Theorem , utility measurement, decision analysis, and values. The text takes a broad-based, introductory-level view to the field of psychological decision theory, and has seen use as a textbook, both for Baron's own introductory course [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/p153.htm] and for courses in decision theory at other universities [http://www.unc.edu/courses/2007fall/psyc/433/001/syllabus.html] .He has also authored "Morality and Rational Choice" [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0792322762] , "Against Bioethics" [http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10843] , and "Judgment Misguided" [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195111087] . Additionally, he is the editor of "Teaching Decision Making to Adolescents" and "Psychological Perspectives on Justice" (with Barbara Mellers).
Baron's Ph.D. students have included
Jane Beattie andJonathan Haidt .External links
* [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/ Website]
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