In the spirit of the 2020 US presidential election, Dr. Jonathan Baron and I discuss moral judgment and individual decision-making in today’s episode. Dr. Baron is the founding editor of the open-access journal Judgment and Decision Making and has been on several other journals' editorial boards. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science, and was the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
*
Dr. Baron's work has occurred primarily within the field of judgment and decision making, a multi-disciplinary area that applies psychology to problems in economics, law, business, and public policy. This field began by contrasting human decision behavior to individual decision-making and judgment theories such as probability theory and expected 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 are omission bias (the tendency for people to excuse acts of omission more easily than acts of commission) and protected values (principles on which people are unwilling to accept tradeoffs).

*

Dr. Baron is the author of Thinking and Deciding. The text takes a broad-based, introductory-level view of psychological decision theory, and has seen use as a textbook. He has also authored Morality and Rational Choice, Against Bioethics, and Judgment Misguided.
*

During our interview, we discussed:
-The trends of political polarization and conspiracy thinking.
-The problems of improving everyday decisions as a result of institutional issues.
-Applying general principles of decision analysis.
-The evolution of a person’s social standards.
-Omission bias in politics.
-The cost-benefit analysis of environmental policies.
-The expression of moral and moralistic values regarding the political issues of gay marriage and abortion.
-The role of empathy in the utilitarian point of view.
-The factors that affect moral judgment.

***

To learn more about Dr. Jonathan Baron, check out https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/!

***

Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please complete our podcast sponsorship form.

***

If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/Itunes? It takes less than 60 seconds and other listeners and guests definitely appreciate them!