User:Alexander L. Davis

Contact Info

Alexander L. Davis

• Alexander L. Davis
• Carnegie Mellon University
• 5000 Forbes Avenue
• Pittsburgh, PA, United States.
• Email me through OpenWetWare

I work in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. I learned about OpenWetWare from Wikipedia and John Miller. My main interest is creativity and hypothesis generation with respect to normative, descriptive, and prescriptive decision-making, focusing on scientific decisions.

Education

• 2012, PhD, Carnegie Mellon University, Behavioral Decision Research
• 2009, MS, Carnegie Mellon University, Behavioral Decision Research
• 2007, BS, Northern Arizona University, Psychology

Research Interests and Lab Notebooks

• Notebook Template

Psychology of Methodology

What are the important psychological aspects of designing, implementing, interpreting, and reporting experimental research?

• Error Models and Data Sharing in Hindsight

• The Psychology Of Empirical Data Sharing: Coherence, Correspondence And Performance

Human Altruism

How do humans behave when they can prevent harm to others by incurring it on themselves?

• Breaking Bads

Human Behavior and Electricity Consumption

What are the cognitive and motivational factors involved in understanding one's electricity consumption?

• Setting a Standard for Pilot Studies
• In-Home Displays
• Nudgers and Nudgees
• CMU Energy and Behavior Group

Methodology of Psychology

How can prescriptive approaches to scientific research help our cognitive and social limitations? I'm writing a book. Not sure what to call it yet. I'll make it available, for free, and I'd very much appreciate comments, critiques, suggestions or whatever. Since it is free, if you feel inclined to show your gratitude to me financially, I suggest donating to kiva.org or your favorite charity.

[Book full pdf] Section 1 Section 2 Section 3 Section 4 Section 5 Section 6 Section 7 Section 8 Section 9 Section 10 Section 11

Human and Artificial Intelligence

How can human performance be elucidated by comparing it to modern artificial intelligence methods. For examaple, how does human knowledge representation compare to an ontology? Applications include drug discovery.

Courses

Research101

My take on everything you need to know to complete an experimental research project.

Adaptive Pretesting

Adaptive design for pretesting: How can we use adaptive design to develop very strong experiments efficiently? We may want to test our auxiliary assumptions 'online' until they converge into a reasonable risk level.

Stats for Social Sciences

Rest assured there will be no p-values. Cohen et al, applied regression

Advanced Stats

Rest assured there will be no p-values. Cosma's Class; Bayesian Data Analysis; Gelman and Hill;

Intro to Cognitive Psychology

Human thinking, reasoning, perception, etc.

Intro to Social Psychology

Motivation, social cognition, etc.

Intro to Experimental Economics

Real human behavior in microeconomics and game theory. Kagel and Roth: Handbook of Expeirmental Economics; Plott and Smith: Handbook of experiment economics results

Computer Science for Social Sciences

Python, Octave, R; Stats; Complexity Theory; Sipser: Introduction to the theory of computation

Decision Theory

Raiffa; Levi? Seidenfeld; Savage; Ramsey; Berger: Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis; Gilboa: Theory of decision under uncertainty; Pratt and Raiffa: Statistical Decision Theory; Kadane (2011; pg. 1-4) has a nice demonstration of how to be a dutch bookie.

Behavioral Decision Research

Normative, Descriptive, Prescriptive; Poulton; K&T; von Winterfeldt and Edwards; Raiffa and Tversky: Decision-Making; Gigerenzer: Adaptive Thinking

Game Theory

Von Neumann and Morgenstern; Luce and Raiffa: Games and Decisions

Behavioral Game Theory

Camerer: Behavioral Game Theory; Builds on Decision Theory with empirical evidence. Prereqs: Decision theory; stats

Computational Cognitive Science

Covers three of the most successful computational models: ACT-R; Church; Connectionist; Anderson: How can the mind exist?

Psychology of Science

Herb Simon; Gorman; Klahr; Wason; Klayman and Ha;Carruthers, Stich and Siegal: The cognitive basis of science

Philosophy of Science

Peirce; Carnap; Wittgenstein; Quine; Duhem; Lakatos; Kuhn; Popper; Van Bovens and Hartmann; Mayo; Suppes;

Machine Learning

MacKay: information theory, inference and learning algorithms; Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman: The elements of statistical learning; Bishop: Pattern recognition and Machine Learning

Publications

1. Preparing for smart grid technologies: A behavioral decision research approach to understanding consumer expectations about smart meters

   http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421511009244

Useful links

• Introductory tutorial
• OpenWetWare help pages
• OpenCog
• Marketscape
• Berlin Risk Numeracy Test
• Data Mining Tutorials
• Graphviz
• Usability
• NUSAP
• Church
• My Dataverse
• Cochrane Handbook
• CONSORT
• ACT-R