Author archives

Magda Osman, Principal Research Associate in Basic and Applied Decision Making, Cambridge Judge Business School. The ethos of my work has been to take a critical eye to well accepted views and challenge the status quo. As a result, my research interests cover a range of areas that include decision-making, learning, problem-solving, biases, risk and uncertainty, agency and control, and the unconscious. (see www.magdaosman.com My research helps answer questions like: How do we make decisions in uncertain situation? Does our unconscious rule our behaviour? For instance, my work has shown that when making complex decisions, we do best when we figure out what the underlying causal set up of the situation is. My work also shows that our belief in our ability to control the world around us helps to reduce our experiences of uncertainty, and helps improve our actual ability to control different situations. My work and that of my lab also helps to show that methods, such as nudges, designed to improve our decision-making are not reliable, are ethically problematic, and that the public have concerns about them, especially if the nudges are designed by government bodies compared to scientists.

Conspiracy theories aren’t on the rise – we need to stop panicking

Several polls in the past couple of years (including from Ipsos, YouGov and most recently Savanta on behalf of Kings College Policy Institute and the BBC) have been examining the kinds of conspiratorial beliefs people have. The findings have led to a lot of concern and discussion. There are several revealing aspects of these polls. Magda Osman, Principal Research Associate in Basic and Applied Decision Making, Cambridge Judge Business School, is interested in what claims are considered conspiratorial and how these are phrased. But she is also interested in the widespread belief that conspiracy theories are apparently on the rise, thanks to the internet and social media. Is this true and how concerned should we really be about conspiracy theories?

Subjects: Climate Change, Education, Internet Trends, KM, Social Media