Joshua Lewis

I am an Assistant Professor of Marketing at New York University.

My research focuses on decisions that have important implications for others’ wellbeing, such as philanthropists deciding which cause to tackle, politicians deciding which policy to adopt, or scientists deciding whether to publish potentially dangerous findings. I am particularly interested in the biases, misperceptions, and attitudes that prevent decision-makers from making the best choices in utilitarian terms (that is, impartially considering the welfare of everybody). This research is designed to inform effective altruism (the process of using high-quality evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to help others as much as possible) and longtermism (the idea of prioritizing the long-term future because of the vast number of individuals who could live in it). Sometimes it entails exploring altruistic decision-making, sometimes it entails studying the psychology of existential risks to humanity. So nothing too heavy.

Research questions that interest me right now:

Why don’t people think more about catastrophic risk?
What mistakes do people make when judging risks from artificial intelligence?
How can we help people appropriately weigh high stakes outcomes with very low probabilities?
How can we make people more tolerant of uncertainty in altruistic decisions?

If you are interested in working on research questions like these as a postdoc, fulltime or part-time research assistant, or even just collaborating as co-authors, please get in touch.

Most of my previous work is on basic judgment and decision making. In 2019, this work won the Society for Judgment and Decision Making's Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award. In 2020, it won the Association for Consumer Research's Franco Nicosia Award for the Best Competitive Paper. Yet, I am still the least cited "Joshua Lewis" on Google Scholar.

I list some of my papers below.
My CV is available here.
You can email me at: joshua.lewis@nyu.edu.

Publications
(updated January 2022)

Lewis, Joshua, Daniel Feiler, and Ron Adner (2022), “The Worst-First Heuristic: How Decision-Makers Manage Conjunctive Risk,” Management Science.

Lewis, Joshua and Joseph P. Simmons (2020), “Prospective Outcome Bias: Incurring (Unnecessary) Costs to Achieve Outcomes That Are Already Likely,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(5), 870–888.

Lewis, Joshua, Celia Gaertig, and Joseph P. Simmons (2019), “Extremeness Aversion Is a Cause of Anchoring,” Psychological Science, 30(2), 159–173.

Working Papers

Moore, Alexander, Joshua Lewis, Emma E. Levine, and Maurice E. Schweitzer, “Trusting Kind Friends and Fair Leaders: How Relational Hierarchy Affects the Antecedents of Trust,” invited for second-round revision at Organizational Behavioral and Human Decision Processes.

Lewis, Joshua and Deborah A. Small, “Ineffective Altruism: Giving Less When Donations Do More Good.”

Lewis, Joshua, Alex Rees-Jones, Uri Simonsohn, and Joseph P. Simmons, “Diminishing Sensitivity to Outcomes: What Prospect Theory Gets Wrong about Diminishing Sensitivity to Price.”