Psychology
Judgment and Decision Making; Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Cognition
Research Synopsis:
I study the cognitive basis of human judgment and decision making with the use of mathematical and computational models. There are two interrelated components of my research program. The first involves understanding how people sample and aggregate information in order to form preferences and beliefs: I extend psychological research on perceptual decision making and memory retrieval to explain behavioral findings in domains such as multiattribute choice, risky choice, and probability judgment. The second component involves specifying the information that is sampled and aggregated in order to form preferences and beliefs. Particularly, I apply methodological insights from semantic memory research and computational linguistics to uncover knowledge representations for objects, attributes, and events that are the focus of everyday judgment and decision tasks.
With progress in both these areas, I aim to build models of judgment and decision making that know what people know and use knowledge in the way people use knowledge. These models should be able to deliberate over and respond to a large variety of everyday decision problems, and moreover, mimic human responses to these problems.
Professor Sudeep Bhatia will not be considering new graduate students for admission for Fall 2025.
Bhatia, S. (in press). Inductive reasoning in minds and machines. Psychological Review.
Abdurahman, S., Vu, H., Zou, W., Unger, L. & Bhatia, S. (in press). A deep learning approach to personality assessment: Generalizing across items and expanding the reach of survey-based research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Evangelidis, I., Bhatia, S., Levav, J. & Simonson, I. (in press). 50 years of context effects: Merging the behavioral and quantitative perspectives. Journal of Consumer Research.
Bhatia, S., & Walasek, L. (2023). Predicting implicit attitudes with natural language data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(25), e2220726120.
Richie, R., Aka, A., & Bhatia, S. (in press). Free association in a neural network. Psychological Review.
Bhatia, S. & Richie, R. (in press). Transformer networks of human conceptual knowledge. Psychological Review.
Gandhi, N., Zou, W., Meyer, C., Bhatia, S., & Walasek, L. (2022). Computational methods for predicting and understanding food judgment. Psychological Science, 33(4), 579-594.
He, L., Analytis, P. P., & Bhatia, S. (2022). The wisdom of model crowds. Management Science, 68(5), 3635-3659.
Zhao, W., Coady, A., & Bhatia, S. (2022). Computational mechanisms for context-based behavioral interventions: A large-scale analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(15) e2114914119.
Zhao, W., Richie, R. & Bhatia, S. (2022). Process and content in decisions from memory. Psychological Review, 129(1), 73–106.
Feiyi Wang [Psychology Graduate Student]