Edward Cokely

Dr. Cokely investigates how people understand and communicate risk, develop expertise, and make better decisions. His research on Skilled Decision Making and Risk Literacy spans cognitive assessment and training, decision support and risk communication, and human-AI teaming. He helped develop the Berlin Numeracy Test (Cokely et al., 2012, 2013, 2014), which has been used by more than 200,000 people from at least 150 countries and has been shown to predict judgment and decision making quality in psychology, medicine, business, engineering, and many other fields. This research contributed to the discovery that statistical numeracy is one of the strongest predictors of risk literacy and decision making skill, often exceeding other measures of cognitive ability, including fluid intelligence. To explain these findings, Dr. Cokely and colleagues proposed Skilled Decision Theory (Cokely et al., 2018), suggesting that skilled decision making largely depends on developing a representative understanding of a decision problem—an intuitive integration of relevant knowledge, emotions, and risks. Rather than primarily relying on analytic reasoning to override intuitions and emotions, risk literacy helps people develop and evaluate their intuitive understanding, including assessing the risk that their understanding is biased. This work provides a foundation for the Developing Intuition Framework for Debiasing (Cokely et al., in press; Feltz & Cokely, 2024; Garcia-Retamero & Cokely, 2017), emphasizing how boosting understanding can be an effective and ethically defensible approach to improving decisions.

Dr. Cokely is a Presidential Research Professor and Professor of Psychology at the University of Oklahoma. He has co-authored nearly 100 scientific papers and one book, helping secure millions of dollars in research funding from organizations including NSF, NAS, NOAA, Templeton, and Medscape. He has received more than 20 research and teaching honors, including the NSF CAREER Award (2013) and the FABBS Early Career Impact Award (2017), recognizing “…major contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior…”. His research has been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist, the Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC Futures, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He serves on the editorial boards of APA’s DECISION and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and is a former associate editor of Judgment and Decision Making. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology at Florida State University (2007), studying with Colleen Kelley and K. Anders Ericsson, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2007-2010), studying with Gerd Gigerenzer, Lael Schooler, and the ABC Research Group.

Dr. Cokely mentors doctoral students in the Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. Program through close collaboration and supervised research on cognitive abilities, decision psychology, and human factors engineering. Former doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars have gone on to faculty and research positions at institutions including the Max Planck Institute, Clemson University, the University of Southern California, the University of Leeds, Pompeu Fabra University, Missouri University of Science & Technology, University of the Punjab, Florida Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, Michigan Technological University, University of Michigan, and Texas Tech University, as well as securing applied-science positions in government and industry at MITRE Corporation, Siemens, CIBEREPS Epidemiology and Public Health, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Graduate student collaborators have co-authored research on topics ranging from risky decision making, misinformation, medical decision making, expertise and numeracy, and cognitive biases to human factors, safety, training, decision aids and risk communication. Graduate students also help teach and mentor undergraduate students and regularly present original research at regional, national, and international conferences and workshops (e.g., SJDM, Psychonomics, HFES, AERA, SRA, CSS, ISIR, ERPROC, SPUDM).

For more on Risk Literacy see:

https://fabbs.org/2017/09/21/better-risk-literacy-better-decisions/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180814-how-we-should-think-about-uncertainty