Stephen Broomell

Stephen Broomell is Associate Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. His work has delivered new insight into how people (can) understand and interpret information on critical domains such as climate change and weather hazards. His approach is to formalize this disconnect by recasting observations as measurements and use psychometric theory to identify what assumptions are likely to hold, highlighting the problematic role of violated assumptions for judgment, inference, and choice. He has applied this theoretical work to studying expert judgment, forecasting, and lay judgment in uncertain contexts. Dr. Broomell’s work focuses on judgment and decision making in uncertain environments. He has found that there are many contexts where observations (scientific or intuitive) provide far less information than is realized because of veiled violations of assumptions.