Sam Johnson

Research interests

I study the cognitive science of markets: how the minds of individuals give rise to emergent economic order. I focus on tools that consumers, investors, and voters use to process information. These tools help us to overcome our inherent cognitive limits but also lead us to make mistakes in our everyday lives.

For example, in the domain of marketing, I have looked at consumers’ lay theories of economics, particularly their zero-sum intuitions about transactions, examining marketing messages that can highlight the benefits of foreign trade. In the domain of finance, I have examined how investors – both amateur and professional – use story-telling to predict future prices. In the policy domain, I have studied moral beliefs about economic exchange, with an eye toward how we can use this knowledge to help increase the supply of transplant organs.

In addition, I carry out basic research in cognitive science, focusing on heuristics and strategies that people intuitively use to evaluate hypotheses. I find that these same principles guide very different psychological processes, including causal reasoning, categorisation, and visual perception; that they are used by young children; and that they feed into complex social processes, such as mentalising, stereotyping, and moral judgment. For this research, I was honoured to receive the 2017 Robert Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society.

To learn more about my research, please visit my website.

Willing to supervise PhD

I am interested in supervising students on a broad range of topics within the broad areas of behavioural economics, consumer psychology, and cognitive and behavioural science. More details are available on my website.