Matthew Lawson

I am an Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD.

I completed my doctoral studies at Duke University in the Fuqua School of Business after receiving a BA in Economics and Management from the University of Oxford.

My research focuses on cognitive and gender biases in organisations and society. Using computational and experimental methods, I look at the structural and cognitive antecedents of biases and their relationship with real-world outcomes.

This research addresses questions such as:

Why do decision biases arise? Are there domain-general strategies to mitigate them?

How does hiring women change stereotypes? How do these stereotypes shape women's experiences in the workplace?

Publications

• Lawson, M. A., Anand, S., & Kakkar, H. (2023) Tribalism and Tribulations: The Social Costs of Not Sharing Fake News. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication.
• Lawson, M. A., Larrick, R. P., & Soll, J. B. (2022). When and why people perform mindless math. Judgment and Decision Making, 17(6).
• Lawson, M. A., & Matz, S. C. (2022). Saying more than we know: How language provides a window into the human psyche. In S. C. Matz (Ed.), The psychology of technology: Social science research in the age of Big Data (pp. 45–85). American Psychological Association.
• Lawson, M. A., Martin, A. E., Huda, I., & Matz, S. C. (2022). Hiring women into senior leadership positions is associated with a reduction in gender stereotypes in organizational language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(9).
• Lawson, M. A., & Kakkar, H. (2022). Of Pandemics, Politics, and Personality: The Role of Conscientiousness and Political Ideology in Sharing of Fake News. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(5), 1154–1177.
• Larrick, R. P., & Lawson, M. A. (2021). Judgment and Decision-Making Processes. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology.
• Lawson, M. A., Larrick, R. P., & Soll, J. B. (2020). Comparing fast thinking and slow thinking: The relative benefits of interventions, individual differences, and inferential rules. Judgment and Decision Making, 15(5), 660-684.