Stian Reimers

Research, Education and Academic Leadership

First and foremost an academic, I have spent the last 25 years researching and teaching in Judgement and Decision Making, first at Warwick, then UCL and for the past 17 years at City St George’s. In recent years I have combined this career with developing academic and digital leadership. I have a broad educational background: a PhD in Experimental Psychology (Cambridge), master’s degrees in science communication (Imperial) and Academic Practice (City), and undergraduate degrees in natural sciences (Cambridge) and English literature (Birkbeck).

Research

I am a senior research academic with 25 years’ post-doctoral experience, over 50 peer-reviewed publications, and over 4,000 citations (according to Google Scholar). As well as research I supervise and examine PhD students, review papers and grant applications, and present at conferences and workshops.

In my career to date I have worked across a range of research areas and methodologies - probably more than I should have - in part because of a rewarding set of collaborations with individuals and organisations. This has spanned associative learning, lifespan cognitive development and decline, contextual decision making, categorisation, cognitive biases, game theory, individual and group differences, financial decision making, empirical legal studies, forecasting, misinformation, and risky and intertemporal choice.

In methodology I was an early pioneer of web-based cognitive research, a strand I have developed to look at opportunities and challenges for web- and mobile-based data collection. I have also innovated in using novel technologies - balance boards and smartphones - to address empirical questions. I use a range of methods: controlled lab- or web-based experiments, correlational studies, secondary data analysis, modelling, and qualitative approaches.

Much of this research work has been in collaboration with other organisations, including frequent work with the BBC to gather data from over half a million website visitors across several projects - including personality and art preference and sex differences in cognition - linked to individual TV series on which I worked as a researcher or scientific adviser.

My own areas of research are related to judgement and decision making (or behavioural science, behavioural economics, economic psychology, depending on what you like to call the field). I list my main areas of interest below.

Judgement and decision making

My main interest is in the way people make decisions and the factors that affect their decision making. This draws on the heuristics and biases tradition - the idea that our mind uses a wide range of shortcuts and rules of thumb that allow it to make judgements and decisions that are quick and usually pretty good but sometimes go awry in ways that work against our best interests. As well as looking at some of the things that affect our decision making, I am also interested in the ways in which we can structure the decision environment to help people make decisions that they're happier with long term - the idea of nudging people towards a beneficial option where they don't have a strong inherent preference. This could be anything from choosing a lower-fee investment or pension option to taking the stairs rather than the lift.

More specifically, much of my research focuses on time and the idea of delay discounting - the extent to which intervening delay makes an option less attractive: Would you rather have £45 in 3 days or £70 in 3 months? As well as looking at some of the factors that make people more willing to wait, I'm interested in the cognitive processes underlying the time-related choices people make, using response times and eye tracking to see the processes people go through when making decisions.

I also have an ongoing interest in forecasting - how we use our judgement to extrapolate trends and predict what will happen next. This could be looking at sales or stock values, weather patterns, or disease case numbers. I have found that people's forecasts for a given trend are affected by other recent trends they've seen, and the graphical format in which trends are displayed.

Finally, across all decision-making research areas, I have a longstanding interest in contextual decision making and the effects of the decision context on the choices people make.

Methodological development

I have always had an interest in exploring new technologies for research. This has led me to look at devices such as digital balance boards to look at postural effects on decision making, and various areas of functionality of mobile devices. I was one of the first researchers to measure response times online, back in 2003 using Macromedia Flash, and led one of the early major online research projects with the BBC, which had over 250,000 participants and led to over 20 publications across a collaborative team.

I spent three years as associate editor of the flagship methodological journal Behavior Research Methods, during which time I handled over 120 manuscripts generally focusing on methodological innovations.