Hello! I’m Anderson Fitch, a graduate student at the University of Florida working with Peter Kvam in the Cognition and Decision Modeling Lab. I use equations that instantiate psychological theories to understand the cognitive processes that contribute to behavior. My research focuses on the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence – exploring how people make decisions, how AI makes decisions, and what we understand about each other.

Given the choice between two alternatives, a person will tend to select the alternative that they value more highly. However, when you ask them how much they would pay for each alternative, they might assign a lower price to the option that they chose. Why do people change their preferences? Does the subjective value they assign to the option change?

Behavior is a product of cognitive processes interacting with the environment. To most accurately predict behavior, a person or AI system has to solve this inversion problem – what cognitive processes led to this behavior? However, AI systems are largely oblivious to the cognitive processes that contribute to behavior. Rather than using past behavior to infer cognition, AI simply uses past behavior and the accompanying environmental conditions to predict future behavior. In other words, AI systems try to solve inversion problems as prediction problems, limiting their generalizability to new environments.

As climate change progresses, we are beginning to feel some of the long-term impacts of our environmental negligence, but why did we ignore these environmental harms for so long? It appears that people undervalue the environmental impacts of their choices – but is this due to a lack of attention or awareness or is it that we judge the value of environmental outcomes in a fundamentally different manner?

The environmental ramifications of a person’s behavior are often delayed, probabilistic, and diffuse. This combination of attributes makes it easy to discount the importance of environmental risks. One approach to increase the importance or subjective value assigned to environmental risks could be to simply draw more attention or give more weight to environmental health. It may also be effective to frame environmental risks in terms of their threat to personal health or valuable property and infrastructure. To choose how to frame environmental risks, it is critical to understand if there are any differences in how the value of these different outcome domains changes in the face of delay or risk.