Jonathan Baron

Not to be confused with Jonathan Barron.

Jonathan Baron (born 1944) is an American psychologist. He is a professor emeritus of psychology^[1] at the University of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making.

Jonathan Baron
Born	1944 (age 80–81) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma mater	Harvard University (BA) University of Michigan (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Moral psychology
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania (since 1974) McMaster University (1970-1974)
Thesis	The threshold for successiveness  (1970)
Doctoral students	Jonathan Haidt Hal Pashler Rebecca Treiman
Website	www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/

Early life and education

Baron was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1944, and received a B.A. in psychology from Harvard University in 1966 and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1970 for his thesis titled The threshold for successiveness.^[2]

Career

Baron is the founding editor of the open-access journal Judgment and Decision Making^[3] and has been on the editorial boards of several other journals. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Psychological Science, and was the president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making for 2006–2007.^[4]

Notable contributions

Baron's work has occurred primarily within the field of judgment and decision making, a multi-disciplinary area that applies psychology to problems in economics, law, business, and public policy. This field began by contrasting human decision behavior with theories of individual decision-making and judgment, such as probability theory and expected utility. Baron's research has extended the focus of judgment and decision making to social problems of resource allocation and ethical decisions. Among the concepts associated with his work are omission bias (the tendency for people to excuse acts of omission more easily than acts of commission) and protected values (principles on which people are unwilling to accept trade-offs).

Baron is author of Thinking and Deciding,^[5] a text that takes on the task of examining psychological research directed at a comprehension of the nature of thinking as he sees it. In this text, Baron covers such topics as risk, bioethics, Bayes' Theorem, utility measurement, decision analysis, and values. The text takes a broad-based, introductory-level view to the field of psychological decision theory.

He has also authored Morality and Rational Choice,^[6] Against Bioethics,^[7] and Judgment Misguided.^[8]

Additionally, he is the editor of Teaching Decision Making to Adolescents and Psychological Perspectives on Justice (with Barbara Mellers).

Baron's Ph.D. students have included Rebecca Treiman, Hal Pashler and Jonathan Haidt.^[9]