Tim Rakow, PhD

Rakow is a reader (associate professor) in psychology at King’s College London, where he researches judgment and decision making and is deputy director for a large undergraduate psychology programme.

Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?

In my research, I investigate a range of topics from the field of judgment and decision making (JDM). My main paradigm for this research is experimental cognitive psychology, which has informed my lab studies of probabilistic inference, decisions from experience, deliberative thinking, valuation, and choice under risk and uncertainty. I also have a more applied line of research that examines clinical judgment and risk communication in medicine and health. As with my basic research studies, in this contextualized research I typically use experimental designs.

I was an associate editor at Thinking & Reasoning (2012–2023), where I handled the JDM submissions. In that role, I aimed to provide authors with as much constructive feedback as possible. I have also adopted this as a goal for my editorship at Decision.

Why is this journal important for the field?

JDM research is truly interdisciplinary. It profitably draws on insights from economics, cognitive science, philosophy, and statistical theory, to name but a few fields. However, to my mind, it is important to have a JDM journal that is sponsored by one of psychology’s prominent academic societies. Psychologists have made major contributions to the understanding of people’s judgments and decisions, and these contributions have come from diverse fields of study within psychology—biological, cognitive, social, developmental, and mathematical psychology—as well as from psychology’s applied research areas. And this works both ways. Because decision making is a core behavior, the findings and conclusions from JDM research are valuable for researchers working in different areas of psychology. Given these connections and overlaps between decision research and multiple areas of psychology research, I think Decision benefits from its affiliation with APA.

Have you introduced or are you planning to introduce any changes?

I have added two manuscript types to those that will be considered for publication in Decision.

First, Decision now invites submissions of registered replication reports. Such manuscripts offer the opportunity for conditional acceptance before data are collected if authors can demonstrate the value of conducting replication research and have a solid plan for conducting that research to a high standard. Acceptance of the final version depends only on following the agreed plan, irrespective of what the data show. The benefits of this format have been widely discussed, and Decision is one of several journals to have begun inviting submissions of this type  in recent years.

The second new manuscript type is the registered adversarial collaboration. This format has several similarities to the registered replication report but is likely something that readers and authors are less familiar with. In an adversarial collaboration, researchers (or research teams) with opposing positions on a research question or theoretical issue commit to an agreed plan for empirical research that offers a realistic opportunity for some adjudication or resolution vis-à-vis their respective positions. Much like with a registered replication report, the conditional acceptance of a registered adversarial collaboration depends only on the case that the authors make for their research and the quality and feasibility of their collaborative research plan. Such collaborations are relatively rare, but the lesson learned from those that have been published is that they promote high-quality research investigations.

The journal’s webpage has guidance for preparing and submitting manuscripts of either of these new types, each of which has been embedded in the journal’s systems for peer review.

What type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

I would like to see good scholarship and good content! To expand on that, I am aware that the wording of an invitation to submit research to a journal may leave researchers in doubt over whether their scholarship is welcome. Many labels are used to describe research of different types, such as “basic,” “applied,” or “translational” research, or the focus or contribution of an article, such as “theoretical” or “empirical.” Although I, like others, find these labels convenient and useful, I have become increasingly mindful that the distinctions they imply are not clear-cut. Applied and translational research can provide insights into basic decision processes. Well-designed empirical investigations can test theory even though the researchers’ write-up may focus on establishing the reliability of the phenomenon rather than the mechanism that generates it. In light of this, I want to encourage the submission of research from diverse research communities and a variety of research perspectives, so long as that research tells readers something substantive about people’s judgment and decision making.

As a final answer to this question, I can suggest a strategy for identifying suitable topics for registered replication reports, which is loosely inspired by the findings of Christensen-Szalanski and Beach (1984), a published comment that I think I first read as a PhD student. In the 1970s, Jay J. J. Christensen-Szalanski and Lee Roy Beach surveyed JDM researchers and found that their impressions about the general quality of human judgment seemed to be based on a restricted range of prominent research studies. Now, I am not one of those doomsayers who believes that psychology has few replicable findings, but I do worry that a handful of JDM’s “textbook examples” have not had the degree of scrutiny that a classic finding deserves. For example, unlike most other go-to examples, my classroom demonstrations have never successfully reproduced the intransitive choice preferences that Tversky (1969) reported. Now, for all sorts of reasons, that specific article might not be due for a replication. Nonetheless, I invite readers to be on the lookout for findings that the field has relied on but that are ripe for a registered replication because they have not undergone sufficient levels of secondary testing.

Christensen-Szalanski, J. J. J., & Beach, L. R. (1984). The citation bias: Fad and fashion in the judgment and decision literature. American Psychologist, 39(1), 75–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.75opens in new window

Tversky, A. (1969). Intransitivity of preferences. Psychological Review, 76(1), 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0026750opens in new window