About the Applied Decision science lab

The Applied Decision Science Lab at Michigan Technological University studies how people make decisions in complex, uncertain, and high‑stakes environments. Our work bridges psychology, human factors, computer science, and cognitive modeling to understand and improve real‑world decision making and judgment.

We focus on how individuals perceive risk, evaluate information, allocate attention, and adapt to changing environments. By combining behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and applied field research, we aim to design systems and tools that support better, safer, and more efficient decisions. Founded and directed by Dr. Jason L. Harman, the Lab has been awarded over $10M in funding from the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the PNC Center for Financial Services Innovation, and the Louisiana Board of Regents.

research

The ATOM project

Information About our Large Multi-University Project Seeking to Measure, Model, and Control Decision Noise

gamification for good

Research on Gamified Assesment of Personlaity and the Application of Gamification to Other Life and Decision Aids

the science of Heuristics in evaluation and selection

We study how simple heuristic informed decision rules can inform, outperform and improve 'optimized' algorythyms including machine learning and LLMs in domains like, personell selection, model evaluation, and sports.

Sundries

Other areas of applied decision science our team researches

people

We're hiring! PostDoc job ad

We're looking for a PostDoc to join the lab in Fall 2026. The new post-doc will support a multi-university research initiative to study and model decision and judgment variability (i.e. noise). The scholar must be ready to conduct research including laboratory studies and simulations, assist in constructing computational cognitive models, conduct literature reviews and manuscript preparation and submission.