Faculty
CRAIG MCKENZIE
Professor
CONTACT:
| Email: | cmckenzie@ucsd.edu |
| Phone: | (858) 534-8075 |
WEBSITE:
http://www-psy.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/
BIOGRAPHY:
Research Interests
Dr. McKenzie's area of interest is judgment and decision making, with an emphasis on inference and uncertainty: How do people search for and use evidence (including their own knowledge) in order to assess how likely something is true? Are people's feelings of certainty warranted by the available evidence? Understanding what determines degree of belief is important and interesting in its own right, but it also has direct implications for decision making under uncertainty, a topic that encompasses a wide variety of human behavior.
Most of his recent research examines how people exploit environmental (or task) structure when making inferences and choices. Many researchers interpret behavior without considering the context in which it usually occurs, which can make reasonable behavior appear irrational. Understanding the environmental conditions under which people typically operate, together with normative principles that make sense given these conditions, can help explain why people behave as they do.
Selected Publications
McKenzie, C. R. M., & Mikkelsen, L. A. (in press). A Bayesian view of covariation assessment. Cognitive Psychology.
McKenzie, C. R. M., Liersch, M. J., & Finkelstein, S. R. (in press). Recommendations implicit in policy defaults. Psychological Science.
Sher, S., & McKenzie, C. R. M. (in press). Information leakage from logically equivalent frames. Cognition.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (in press). Increased sensitivity to differentially diagnostic answers using familiar materials: Implications for confirmation bias. Memory and Cognition.
Roy, M. M., Christenfeld, N. J. S., & McKenzie, C. R. M. (2005). Underestimating the duration of future events: Memory incorrectly utilized or memory bias? Psychological Bulletin, 131, 738-756.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (2005). Judgment and decision making. In K. Lamberts & R. L. Goldstone (Eds.), Handbook of cognition (pp. 321-338). London: Sage.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (2004). Framing effects in inference tasks -- and why they are normatively defensible. Memory and Cognition, 32, 874-885.
McKenzie, C. R. M., Wixted, J. T., & Noelle, D. C. (2004). Explaining purportedly irrational behavior by modeling skepticism in task parameters: An example examining confidence in forced-choice tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 947-959.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (2004). Hypothesis testing and evaluation. In D. J. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 200-219). Oxford: Blackwell.
McKenzie, C. R. M. (2003). Rational models as theories -- not standards -- of behavior. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 403-406.
McKenzie, C. R. M., & Nelson, J. D. (2003). What a speaker's choice of frame reveals: Reference points, frame selection, and framing effects. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10, 596-602.
