PROFILE

Magda Osman, Ph.D., is a principal research associate in basic and applied decision making at Cambridge Judge Business School.

The ethos of her work has been to take a critical eye to well-accepted views and challenge the status quo. As a result, her research interests cover a range of areas that include decision making, learning, problem solving, biases, risk and uncertainty, agency and control, and the unconscious.

Her research helps answer questions like: How do we make decisions in uncertain situation? Does our unconscious rule our behavior?

For instance, her work has shown that when making complex decisions, we do best when we figure out what the underlying causal setup of the situation is. Her work also shows that our belief in our ability to control the world around us helps to reduce our experiences of uncertainty, and helps improve our actual ability to control different situations. Her work and that of her lab also help to show that methods, such as nudges, designed to improve our decision making are not reliable, are ethically problematic, and that the public have concerns about them, especially if the nudges are designed by government bodies compared to scientists.