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: the errors in how people make decisions in general, and the role of gender stereotypes in organizational decision making. On the first topic, he has focused on how people frame the problems they are trying to solve, the limits of deliberative thinking in improving decision making, as well as the behavioral consequences of overconfident beliefs and the differences in how people make risky decisions. In the second line of work, he has used machine learning to study the effects of hiring women into leadership positions on stereotypes in organizational language and how the effectiveness of leadership styles varies by the gender of the leader. His current focus is on the relationship between organizations' use of language and women's experiences in the workplace. More broadly he is interested in the factors that lead to people holding accurate perceptions—of information, decisions, and groups—and the integration of insights from behavioral science into analytical tools.

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