News (and some quotes I like) I have a new blog post on The dark triad of citizenship: parochialism, moralism, and closed-mindedness. The 5th edition of Thinking and Deciding is now available. Chinese translation in progress. (Course syllabus and lecture notes.)

By nationalism I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled `good' or `bad'. But secondly -- and this is much more important -- I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. (George Orwell, "Notes on nationalism", 1945)

Every man is born with a live computer of limitless possibilities, but without the instruction manual. The most important job of science today is to draw up that manual. (Luis Alberto Machado, "The right to be intelligent", 1980)

Some papers of possible current interest

• My best paper ever:
  Baron, J. (1993). Why teach thinking? - An essay. (Target article, commentary and reply not included here.) Applied Psychology: An International Review, 42, 191-237.
• Other papers I consider important:
  Baron, J. & Jurney, J. (1993). Norms against voting for coerced reform. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 347-355
• McCaffery, E. J., & Baron J. (2006). Isolation effects and the neglect of indirect effects of fiscal policies. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 1-14.
• Baron, J., & Ritov. I. (2009). Protected values and omission bias as deontological judgments. In D. M. Bartels, C. W. Bauman, L. J. Skitka, & D. L. Medin (Eds.), Moral Judgment and decision making, Vol. 50 in B. H. Ross (series editor), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, pp. 133–167. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
• Baron, J., Ritov, I., & Greene, J.D. (2012) The duty to support nationalistic policies. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 26, 128-138.
• Baron, J. (2018). Individual mental abilities vs. the world's problems. Journal of Intelligence, 6(2), 23. (open-access book of special issue)
• The next two are included because people keep publishing papers about the CNI model without mentioning its problems (present in the PD and CAN models too).
  Baron, J. & Goodwin, G. P. (2020). Consequences, norms, and inaction: A comment. Judgment and Decision Making, 15(3), 421-442.
• Baron, J. & Goodwin, G. P. (2021). Consequences, norms, and inaction: Response to Gawronski et al. (2020). Judgment and Decision Making, 16(2), 566-595.
• This one is missed by people who continue to publish about corrective dual-processing models of moral judgment without mentioning it.
  Baron, J., & Gürçay, B. (2016). A meta-analysis of response-time tests of the sequential two-systems model of moral judgment. Memory and Cognition, 45(4), 566–575.

Research

I think that deficient thinking is a major determinants of what is wrong in the world, especially when judgments and decisions are made by governments and the citizens who support them. Of particular interest are effects of the absence of actively open-minded thinking and effects of deontological (moral) rules that depart from utilitarianism as a standard.

In addition to studying these types of thinking empirically, I try to analyze the relevant standards from a more philosophical perspective. In the empirical realm, I am also interested in methodology and data analysis.

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• CV (html), (pdf)
• Paid Web studies (I need more volunteers for these.)
• Recommended version of AOT beliefs scale
• Public archives of experiments and data

Experiments, data, unpublished papers, and slides of talks are all licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This means that you can do what you want with them, but you must acknowledge the source.

Teaching and research supervision

Graduate and undergraduate research supervision

I cannot support or sponsor visiting scholars.

I am no longer teaching classes, but here are some old ones:
Seminar in moral judgment, law, and public policy (spring 2013)
Seminar in behavioral law and economics (spring 2011)
Judgments and decisions (graduate, half of fall term 2012)
Judgments and decisions (undergraduate, fall 2010)

Books

• Baron J. (1985). Rationality and intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
• Baron, J. (1988, 1994, 2000, 2008, 2024). Thinking and Deciding. Cambridge University Press.
• Baron, J. & Brown, R. V. (Eds.) (1991). Teaching decision making to adolescents. Erlbaum (now Routledge).
• Baron, J. (1993). Morality and rational choice. Kluwer (now Springer).
• Mellers, B. A. & Baron, J. (Eds.) (1993). Psychological perspectives on justice. Cambridge University Press.
• Baron, J. (1998). Judgment misguided: Intuition and error in public decision making. Oxford University Press. [full text, with permission] (References.)
• Weber, E. U., Baron, J., & Loomes, G., (Eds.) (2000). Conflict and tradeoffs in decision making: Essays in honor of Jane Beattie. Cambridge University Press. (Introduction.)
• Bazerman, M. H., Baron, J., & Shonk, K. (2001). You can't enlarge the pie: The psychology of ineffective government. Basic Books.
• Baron, J. (2006). Against bioethics. MIT Press.
• Li, Y., & Baron, J. (2011). Behavioral research data analysis with R. Springer. e-book
• Brown, R. V. (Edited by J. Baron and K. Brown) (2020). The art and science of making up your mind. Routledge.

Some drafts and talks

• Utilitarian voting (Working paper 5/12/2023)
• Actively open-minded thinking and the political effects of its absence Draft chapter for Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World (Victor Ottati and Chadly Stern, editors; Oxford University Press, 2023)
• Is moral judgment rational? Draft chapter (accepted with revision) for Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology, 2nd edition, edited by Philip Robbins and Bertram Malle.)
• Generality of individual differences in actively open-minded thinking SJDM 2021 (with Wesley Streicher)
• Actively open-minded thinking as metacognition for self and others: A review. (Psychonomic, 11/06/2021)
• Cognitive Liberalism and actively open-minded thinking. (Hebrew University, 10/28/2020)
• Cognitive Liberalism and actively open-minded thinking. (MindCORE, Penn, 7/1/2020) (video)
• People who endorse AOT are sensitive to cues indicating AOT of sources, SJDM 2019 (with Derrick High II)
• How citizens think, and don't think: parochialism, moralism, myside bias, etc. (Ohio State University, 1/17/2020)
• Virtues and vices of citizenship (Moral Psychology Research Group, 2018)
• Measurement of actively open-minded thinking (AOT) (brown bag talk 8/27/2017)
  (old version)
  Current AOT scale.
• Uncertainty and probability within utilitarian theory, submitted for a special issue of Diametros on Ethics and Uncertainty (and accepted after revision).
• A utilitarian perspective on how citizens think about their political decisions, American Political Science Association pre-conference on political psychology, Aug. 31, 2016.
• What do people want from privacy law? For a meeting on privacy, University of Pennsylvania Law School, 2015.
• Philosophical impediments to citizens' use of science, Annenberg conference on science communication, Oct. 17, 2014 (paper)
• Actively open-minded thinking and reflection-impulsivity as alternatives to the sequential two-system theory of the cognitive reflection test and moral judgment (SJDM, 2013).
• Group actively open-minded thinking (Scott, Rohrbaugh, Hou, Metz, Baron, Tetlock) (BDRM 2014).
• Belief overkill (Penn, 5/23/11)
• Citizens' concepts of their duty (Yale, 4/28/11)
• The "culture of honor" in citizens' concepts of their duty (pdf)
  Wharton Issue Brief about this study
• The nature and origin of some non-utilitarian moral rules. (Presented at Yale, 2/11/09.)
• Moral heuristics and biases, Presidential Address, Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM), 11/19/07.
• Citizens as moralists. (Presented at Stanford GSB, 5/30/07.)
• Cognitive biases that support parochialism. (Presented at SJDM, 11/06.)
• Parochialism and approval voting, slides for SABE/IAREP talk and link to paper.
• Thinking about tax, slides for 9/27/05 Penn Colloquium, with link to papers.
• Thinking about global warming, slides for 11/12/04 Princeton meeting.

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• Papers with Min Gong are here.
• My papers listed at Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Articles made public only on the Web:

• Prospects for utilitarian decision analysis. (slides)
• Baron, J., & Li, Y. (2000, revised 2011). Notes on the use of R for psychology experiments and questionnaires. (pdf)
• Prasad, P., & Baron, J. (1995). Measurement of gender-role attitudes, beliefs, and principles. (Contains survey.)
• Gürçay-Morris, B., & Baron, J. (2023). The use of alternative reasons in probabilistic judgment.
  (Training for last study.)
• Baron, J. (2017). Assessment of actively open-minded thinking (unfunded grant proposal).
• Baron, J. (2003). De-biasing by calculation, elaboration, and reduction.
• Baron, J., Gurmankin, A. D., & Kunreuther, H. (2003). A comparative approach to protective behavior. (pdf)
• Baron, J., et al. (2002). Attitudes toward the ethics of paying subjects for risky experiments.
• Baron, J. (2002). Value trade-offs and the nature of utility: bias, inconsistency, protected values, and other problems. Prepared for conference on Behavioral Economics and Neoclassical Economics, American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, MA, July, 2002.
• Lim, C. S., & Baron, J. (1997). Protected values in Malaysia, Singapore, and the United States.
• Baron, J., Neiderhiser, B., & Gandy, O. H. (1997). Perceptions and attributions of race differences in health risks.
• Eisenberg, A. E., Baron, J., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1996). Individual differences in risk aversion and anxiety.
• Chaitas, S., Solodkin, A, & Baron, J. (1995). Students' attitudes toward social dilemmas in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States
• Baron, J., Schulkin, J., & Kunreuther, H. (1990). Perceived uncertainty and the response to global warming.
• Baron, J., Laskey, K., and Brown, R. V. (1989). Going through the goop: An introduction to decision making. (Written for high-school students.)
  Ukrainian translation by StudyCrumb. Russian translation by Studybounty.
• My obit for Rex V. Brown (with link to another one)
• Articles in Regulatory Review (blog):
  * How geographic boundaries determine the social cost of carbon (2017)
  * The discount rate for the social cost of carbon (2017)
  * Justifying health insurance (2017)

Articles published or in press

• Baron, J. (1975). Stimuli and subjects in one-tailed tests. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 6, 608-610.
• Baron, J. & Treiman, R. (1980). Some problems in the study of differences in cognitive processes. Memory and Cognition, 8, 313-321.
• Galotti, K. M., Baron, J., & Sabini, J. (1986). Individual differences in syllogistic reasoning: deduction rules or mental models? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115, 16-25.
• Baron, J., Badgio, P., & Gaskins, I. W. (1986). Cognitive style and its improvement: A normative approach. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Advances in the psychology of human intelligence, Vol. 3, pp. 173-220. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Baron, J. (1986). Tradeoffs among reasons for action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 16, 173-195.
• Baron, J. (1987). An hypothesis about the training of intelligence. In D. N. Perkins, J. Lochhead, & J. Bishop (Eds.), Thinking: the second international conference, pp. 60-67. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. (scanned version)
• Baron, J., Beattie, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Heuristics and biases in diagnostic reasoning: II. congruence, information, and certainty. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 42, 88-110.
• Baron, J., & Hershey, J. C. (1988). Outcome bias in decision evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 569-579.
• Baron, J. (1988). Utility, exchange, and commensurability. Journal of Thought, 23, 111-131.
• Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1990). Reluctance to vaccinate: omission bias and ambiguity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 3, 263-277. (Reprinted in C. Sunstein (Ed.), Behavioral Law and Economics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.)
• Baron, J. (1991). Beliefs about thinking. In J. F. Voss, D. N. Perkins, & J. W. Segal (Eds.), Informal reasoning and education, pp. 169-186. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Spranca, M., Minsk, E., & Baron, J. (1991). Omission and commission in judgment and choice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 76-105. (pdf)
• Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1992). Status-quo and omission bias. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5, 49-61.
• Baron, J. (1992). The effect of normative beliefs on anticipated emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 320-330.
• Baron, J., Granato, L., Spranca, M., & Teubal, E. (1993). Decision making biases in children and early adolescents: Exploratory studies. Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 39, 23–47.
• Baron, J. (1993). Heuristics and biases in equity judgments: a utilitarian approach. In B. A. Mellers and J. Baron (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on justice: Theory and applications, pp. 109-137. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Baron, J. & Ritov, I. (1993). Intuitions about penalties and compensation in the context of tort law. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 7, 17-33.
• Baron, J., Gowda, R., & Kunreuther, H. (1993). Attitudes toward managing hazardous waste: What should be cleaned up and who should pay for it? Risk Analysis, 13, 183-192.
• Baron, J. & Ritov, I. (1994). Reference points and omission bias. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 59, 475-498.
• Baron, J. & Frisch, D. (1994). Ambiguous probabilities and the paradoxes of expected utility. In G. Wright & P. Ayton (Eds.), Subjective probability, pp. 273–294. Chichester, Sussex: Wiley.
• Baron, J. (1994). Nonconsequentialist decisions (with commentary and reply). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17, 1-42.
• Beattie, J., Baron, J., Hershey, J. C., & Spranca, M. (1994). Determinants of decision attitude. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 7, 129-144.
• Baron, J. (1995). Myside bias in thinking about abortion. Thinking and Reasoning, 1, 221-235. (pdf)
• Baron, J. (1995). Blind justice: Fairness to groups and the do-no-harm principle. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 8, 71-83. (pdf)
• Baron, J. (1995). A psychological view of moral intuition. Harvard Review of Philosophy, 5, 36-40.
• Beattie, J. & Baron, J. (1995). In-kind vs. out-of-kind penalties: preference and valuation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 1, 136-151. (pdf)
• Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1995). Outcome knowledge, regret, and omission bias. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 64, 119-127.

  Baron, J. (1995). A theory of social decisions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 25, 103–114.

• Baron, J. (1996). Norm-endorsement utilitarianism and the nature of utility. Economics and Philosophy, 12, 165-182.
• Baron, J. (1996). Do no harm. In D. M. Messick & A. E. Tenbrunsel (Eds.), Codes of conduct: Behavioral research into business ethics, pp. 197-213. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Baron, J., & Greene, J. (1996). Determinants of insensitivity to quantity in valuation of public goods: contribution, warm glow, budget constraints, availability, and prominence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 2, 107-125.
• Baron, J., & Maxwell, N. P. (1996). Cost of public goods affects willingness to pay for them. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 9, 173-183.
• Baron, J. (1997). Biases in the quantitative measurement of values for public decisions. Psychological Bulletin, 122, 72-88.
• Baron, J. (1997). Political action vs. voluntarism in social dilemmas and aid for the needy. Rationality and Society, 9, 307-326.
• Baron, J., & Spranca, M. (1997). Protected values. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70, 1-16.
• Baron, J. (1997). Confusion of relative and absolute risk in valuation. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14, 301-309.
• Baron, J. (1998). Trust: beliefs and morality. In A. Ben-Ner & L. Putterman (Eds.), Economics, values, and organization, pp. 408–418. Cambridge University Press.
• Ritov, I., & Baron, J. (1999). Protected values and omission bias. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 79, 79-94.
• Baron, J., & Miller, J. G. (2000). Limiting the scope of moral obligations to help: A cross-cultural investigation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31, 705-727.
• Baron, J., & Siepmann, M. (2000). Using web questionnaires for judgment and decision making research. In M. H. Birnbaum (Ed.), "Psychological Experiments on the Internet" (New York: Academic Press).
• Baron, J., & Leshner, S. (2000). How serious are expressions of protected values. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6, 183-194.
• Baron, J., Hershey, J. C., & Kunreuther, H. (2000). Determinants of priority for risk reduction: the role of worry. Risk Analysis, 20, 413-428.
• Baron, J. (2000). Measuring value tradeoffs: problems and some solutions. In Elke Weber, Jonathan Baron, and Graham Loomes (Eds.), Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision making: Essays in Honor of Jane Beattie, pp. 231-259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Baron, J. (2000). Can we use human judgments to determine the discount rate? Risk Analsysis, 20, 861-868.
• Greene, J., & Baron, J. (2000). Intuitions about declining marginal utility. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 14, 243-255.
• Baron, J., Wu, Z., Brennan, D. J., Weeks C., and Ubel, P. A., (2001). Analog scale, ratio judgment and person trade-off as utility measures: biases and their correction. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 14, 17-34.
• Baron, J., & Ubel, P. A. (2001). The desire to revise a priority list based on cost-effectiveness: The role of the prominence effect and distorted utility judgments. Medical Decision Making, 21, 278-287. ohp1-4
• Baron, J. (2001). Confusion of group-interest and self-interest in parochial cooperation on behalf of a group. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45, 283-296.
• Royzman, E. B., & Baron, J. (2002). The preference for indirect harm. Social Justice Research, 15, 165-184. (pdf)
• Barron, J., & Ubel, P. A. (2002). Types of inconsistency in health-state utility judgments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 89, 1100-1118.
• Baron, J. (2003). Value analysis of political behavior - self-interested : moralistic :: altruistic : moral. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 151, 1135-1167.
• Baron, J., & Kemp, S. (2004). Support for trade restrictions, attitudes, and understanding of comparative advantage. Journal of Economic Psychology, 25, 565-580.
• Baron, J. & Ritov, I. (2004). Omission bias, individual differences, and normality. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 94, 74-85.
• Gurmankin Levy, A., & Baron, J. (2005). How bad is a 10% chance of losing a toe? Judgments of probabilistic conditions by doctors and laypeople. Memory and Cognition, 33, 1399-1406.
• McCaffery, E. J., & Baron J. (2005). The political psychology of redistribution. UCLA Law Review, 52, 1745–1792.
• McCaffery, E. J., & Baron J. (2006). Thinking about tax. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 12(1), 106-135.
• Baron, J. (2006). Thinking about global warming. Climatic Change (special issue on "The psychology of long term risk" edited by A. Todorov and M. Oppenheimer), 77, 137-150.
• Baron, J., Bazerman, M. H., & Shonk, K. (2006). Enlarging the societal pie through wise legislation: A psychological perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 123-132.
• Baron, J. (2009). Cognitive biases in moral judgments that affect political behavior. Synthese, 172, 7–35.
• Baron, J. (2009). Belief overkill in political judgments. Informal Logic, 29, 368-378.
• Baron, J., & Ritov, I. (2009). The role of probability of detection in judgments of punishment. Journal of Legal Analysis, 2, 553-590.
• Baron, J., & Szymanska, E. (2010). Heuristics and biases in charity. In D. Oppenheimer & C. Olivola (Eds). The science of giving: Experimental approaches to the study of charity, pp. 215–236. New York: Taylor and Francis. (slides)
• Baron, J. (2010). Looking at individual subjects in research on judgment and decision making (or anything). Acta Psychologica Sinica, 42(1), 1-11.
• Baron, J. (2012). The point of normative models in judgment and decision making. Frontiers in Cognitive Science, 3 (special issue on ``From is to ought: The place of normative models in the study of human thought'', edited by S. Elqayam & David E. Over). doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00577
• Baron, J. (2012). Parochialism as a result of cognitive biases. In R. Goodman, D. Jinks, & A. K. Woods (Eds.), Understanding social action, promoting human rights, pp. 203–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Available in Oxford Scholarship Online, in some libraries.)
• Baron, J. (2012). The 'culture of honor' in citizens' concept of their duty as voters. Rationality and Society, 24(1), 37--72.
• Baron, J., Gürçay, B., Moore, A. B., & Starcke, K. (2012). Use of a Rasch model to predict response times to utilitarian moral dilemmas. Synthese (special issue on Psychological Models of (Ir)rationality and Decision Making, edited by C. Witteman & W. van der Hoek), 189, Supplement 1, 107-117.
• Baron, J. (2013). Articles about motivation, psychology, and volunteerism in J. E. Crimmins (Ed.), The Bloomsbury encyclopedia of utilitarianism. Bloomsbury
• Baron, J., Mellers, B. A., Tetlock, P. E., Stone, E., & Ungar, L. H. (2014) Two Reasons to Make Aggregated Probability Forecasts More Extreme, Decision Analysis, 11(2), 133-145.
• Baron, J., Scott, S., Fincher, K., & Metz, S. E. (2015). Why does the Cognitive Reflection Test (sometimes) predict utilitarian moral judgment (and other things)? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 4(3), 265-284.
• Baron, J. (2015). Citizenship and morality. Current Opinion in Psychology, 6, 6-9.
• Baron, J. (2017). Comment on Kahan and Corbin: Can polarization increase with actively open-minded thinking? Research and Politics, 4(1).
• Baron, J., & Wilkinson-Ryan, T. (2018). Conceptual foundations: A birds-eye view. In K. Zeiler and J. C. Teitelbaum (Eds.), Research handbook on behavioral law and economics, pp. 19-44. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
• Baron, J. (2018). Forms of explanation and why they may matter. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3(1), 52. (Special issue on effects of neuroscience, edited by Woo-kyoung Ahn and Deena Weisberg.)
• Baron, J. & Jost, J. T. (2019). False equivalence: Are liberals and conservatives in the U.S. equally "biased"? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(2). 292-303.
• Baron, J. (2019). Actively open-minded thinking in politics. Cognition, 188, 8-18. (Special issue on cognition and politics, edited by Steven Sloman and Elke Weber.)
• Baron, J. (2021). Richard M. Hare. In MacAskill, W., Chappell, R. Y., & Meissner, D. Utilitarianism (web-based introduction).
• Baron, J., Isler, O., & Yılmaz, O. (2023). Actively open-minded thinking and the political effects of its absence. In V. Ottati and C. Stern (Eds.), Divided: Open-Mindedness and Dogmatism in a Polarized World, pp. 162-184. Oxford University Press, 2023. (Note: The ``get access'' button probably won't work. Go through your university library, if you have one.)
• Baron, J. (2024). Two components of individual differences in actively open-minded thinking standards: Myside bias and uncertainty aversion. Thinking and Reasoning, 30(4), 648-673.