Asher Lawson

Asher Lawson is an assistant professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD. He holds a PhD from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and a BA from the University of Oxford.

His research investigates the biases in how people make decisions, and how we can improve those decisions with targeted interventions. In this work, he has focused on two main topics: debiasing individuals' numeric judgments and using large language models (LLMs) to understand human decision making. On the first topic, he has focused on how people frame the problems they are trying to solve, the role of deliberative thinking in improving decision making, and the nature of overconfident beliefs. In the second line of work, he has used LLMs and other forms of natural language processing (NLP) to understand gendered attitudes, as well as beliefs about inequality across the globe. More broadly he is interested in the factors that lead to people holding accurate perceptions of information, decisions, and groups, how these perceptions can be translated into effective decision making, and the use of machine learning to develop and improve psychological theories.

His research has been featured in leading scientific journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Communications, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Judgment and Decision Making. Leading news outlets have covered his research, including Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, and Politico. He has chaired symposia and given talks at a range of conferences including the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Academy of Management.