Gretchen Chapman, a professor of psychology, chairs the Department of Psychology on the New Brunswick Campus and is the department’s director of graduate students. She grew up in Pennsylvania and attended college and graduate school there, earning her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Chapman was introduced to the world of teaching and scholarship by her father, a retired professor of religion at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA, and developed a passion for scientific experimentation after her introductory psychology professor invited her to work in his research lab. Her specialty is the psychology of decision making, especially in the areas of health and medicine. Much of her research – including a 1999-2004 study involving Rutgers faculty and staff – has examined how people make decisions about getting flu shots. “As you might expect, people’s perceptions of risk are a big predictor, but emotions are also a key part of the decision. A very important part of risk perception is the hot part, the emotional part, not the cold, cognitive part,” she said. Chapman’s research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. This past summer,she recruited Rutgers students for a computerized game experiment about vaccination decision making at her Medical Decision Making Lab on the Busch Campus.

FOCUS: Behind every student going off to college for the first time is a worried parent, wondering if the child will be making wise decisions.  Is that worry justified?

Chapman: I can think of reasons why the worry is legitimate. We know context is a huge determiner of behavior, and a college student moving out of a parent’s home radically shifts the environment. So it is not unreasonable to think that the student’s behavior might be quite different than it was in the parents’ home. And most people would agree – including students – that many students err on the side of doing too much partying and not enough studying. Of course, college is also an opportunity, a really exciting opportunity, to grow and explore, so maybe an interesting question would be to ask: Why are parents concentrating so much on the worry part, rather than the excitement part? Is imagining the bad things that could happen to your kids in college easier than imagining the wonderful things?

FOCUS: Do we teach people how to make decisions?

Chapman: I think in general, we don’t do a very good job of teaching this. I have a colleague at Carnegie Mellon whose research has focused on why women make less than men. Her research has showed that they don’t negotiate as well; they end up with lower salaries because they don’t ask for them. She started working with the Girl Scouts, and they developed a badge in decision making. I can think of a few other isolated examples, where people have taken on the task of teaching children how to make better decisions. But in general, that’s something we don’t explicitly teach. They’re just expected to pick it up.

FOCUS: How do people make decisions?

Chapman: Psychologists who study decision making contrast two different types of theories. Normative theories prescribe the best or most rational way to make decisions. Descriptive theories are psychological, about how people actually make decisions. The places where actual human decision making deviates from normative theories are of great interest, because they tell us a lot about people’s behavior.

People frequently make decisions by using heuristics, or simple solutions. In the right context heuristics yield high accuracy with low cognitive effort. But they also lead to systematic error in certain circumstances. Let me give you an example. Suppose you are deciding on what car to buy. The normative approach would be to identify all the attributes that correspond to your goals – for example, reliability, safety, fuel use, pollution, comfort features, price, etc. You would rate each car on each attribute. Then you would weight each attribute according to how important it is to your goals. Finally, you would compute a weighted score for each car, and pick the car with the best score. That method conforms with normative theory, but it is computationally complex. A heuristic you might use would be to base your decision on a simple cue.

FOCUS: Isn’t life an endless series of decision-making exercises? It’s exhausting just to think about how many decisions we make every day.

Chapman: Some behaviors are routine and habitual, like brushing the top row of your teeth before the bottom row. Intentional decisions are definitely more cognitively taxing. You might think people would deliberate more about the important decisions, but I have friends who stare at the menu for 20 minutes before deciding what to order.

FOCUS: Could your research influence public policy, or even save lives?

Chapman: The Centers for Disease Control recommends that older adults get flu shots, as well as people with contact with older adults and people with chronic health conditions. Old people do most of the dying from the flu, but younger people spread it. If you want to protect the population, you should vaccinate the younger people. But you would be asking young people to take on the costs of the vaccination, so someone else – the elderly – can benefit. That would require an altruistic motive. We’re now running a lab experiment to see whether vaccination decisions are influenced by a desire to help others in some situation. Groups of 10 research participants play a “game” where, in each round, they decide whether or not to vaccinate in order to reduce their risk of getting the flu.