Visiting Research Scientist, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany
Shabnam Mousavi has a Ph.D. in economics and one in statistics. Her main research agenda evolves around the ontological nature of uncertainty as faced by humans in the making of their decisions. She pursues a formal framework for operational axiomatization of actual behavior. Along this line of work she is establishing structural mutualities between the science of heuristics and some models of practical wisdom. In another line of work, she develops and refines Markov chain models for correlated data. Research into heuristic strategies as practically wise decision tools has revealed evidence, for the first time, that “less can be more.” Whereas mainstream empirical wisdom literature has equated wisdom with expert knowledge, these findings suggest that under real life uncertainties, intuitive heuristics can allow for successful navigation of the state of ignorance, which entails partial but effective information. The next step of this project will specify conditions under which this counterintuitive finding is valid, and hence can be used to develop real-world decision aids.
Source: Center for Practical Wisdom, University of Chicago