Jason L. Harman

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Louisiana State University

Digital maps are important for many decision-making tasks that require situational awareness, navigation, or location-specific data. Often, digital mapping tools must generate a map that displays labels near associated features in a visually appealing manner, without occluding important information. Automated label placement systems generally accom...

Objectives Digital map applications produce maps on the fly, using label placement algorithms to optimize the map layout for various factors. Previous work has made great strides in quickly generating layout placement algorithms that minimize collisions or reduce clutter, but little has been done to explore optimizing layouts while considering the...

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are often assumed to be the most accurate way of producing predictive models despite problems with explainability and adverse impact. The 3rd annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Machine Learning Competition sought to find ML models for personnel selection that could balance the best of ML pre...

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are often assumed to be the most accurate way of producing pre-dictive models despite problems with explainability and adverse impact. The 3rd annual Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Machine Learning Competition sought to find ML models for personnel selection that could balance the best of ML pr...

The interaction between goals and affect in decision making is not well understood. We test the affective-motivational route theory (AMR: Aarts et al. 2008b) which predicts that positive affect primed along with a goal leads to goal pursuit, whereas negative affect primed along with a goal does not lead to less goal pursuit. In the current study, w...

The 3rd annual SIOP Machine Learning (ML) Competition sought to find ML models for personnel selection that could balance the best of ML prediction balanced with the constraint of not increasing adverse impact. To test the possible advantages of simple rules over ML algorithms, we entered a simple and explainable rule based model inspired by recent...

We examined the ability of game-like personality measures (GPMs) to reduce careless responding and faking. Across two experiments (N = 279) participants completed both GPMs and the IPIP-50. In Experiment 1 participants completed both assessments initially and again 1 to 4 weeks later with instructions to make themselves appear as desirable as possi...

An important aspect of making good decisions is the ability to adapt to changes in the values of available choice options, and research suggests that we are poor at changing behavior and adapting our choices successfully. The current paper contributes to clarifying the role of memory on learning and successful adaptation to changing decision enviro...

Game-like personality assessment has been introduced as a way to minimize presentation bias and careless responding. In this paper, the game-like personality measure (GPM), a personality assessment embedded within a narrative decision-based adventure, is iterated and extended from proof of concept to construct valid measure. The revised game was gi...

Incorporating game elements into personality assessment has the potential to address several common criticisms of personality measures. Game‐like personality measures accomplished this by creating a narrative text‐based fantasy game where players' choices throughout the game are used to measure the big five personality factors. The current work tes...

Kim and Beck (2020b) demonstrated that value-driven attention is based on relative value rather than absolute value, suggesting that prospect theory is relevant to our understanding of value-driven attention. To further this understanding, the present study investigated the impacts of diminishing sensitivity on value-driven attention. According to...

Geospatial information systems (GIS) support decision making and situational awareness in a wide variety of applications. These systems often require large amounts of labeled data to be displayed in a way that is easy to use and understand. Manually editing these information displays can be extremely time-consuming for an analyst. Algorithms have b...

Modeling competitions are a promising method for advancing psychological science. In this commentary to Erev et al. (Psychological Review, 2017, 124, p. 369), we highlight how this promise could be enhanced through modifying competition structures to produce insights more directly in line with the goals of promoting psychological knowledge. We argu...

Effective risk communication during the COVID-19 pandemic is critical for encouraging appropriate public health behaviors. One way that the public is informed about COVID-19 numbers is through reports of daily new cases. However, presenting daily cases has the potential to lead to a dynamic reasoning bias that stems from intuitive misunderstandings...

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a ballot consisting of approvals for as many candidates as they wish, and winners are chosen by tallying up the...

Modeling competitions are a promising method for advancing psychological science. In this commentary to Erev, Ert, Plonsky, Cohen, & Cohen (2017), we highlight how this promise could be enhanced through modifying competition structures to produce insights more directly in line with the goals of promoting psychological knowledge. We argue that a sin...

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting and, in scenarios such as committee or board elections, employing voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent submits a ballot consisting of approvals for as many candidates as they wish, and winners are chosen by tallying up the...

An important aspect of making good decisions is the ability to adapt to changes in the values of available options. Research suggests that we are poor at changing behavior and adapting our choices successfully. This work contributes to clarifying the role of memory on learning and successful adaptation to changing decision environments. We test the...

Vicariously experiencing sporting events is a worldwide phenomenon, and sports results affect fans’ emotional states. The current studies examined how sports results affect spectators’ political and intergroup attitudes. “Strategic” perspectives on social attitudes suggest that spectators may have higher ingroup preference and less egalitarian atti...

In many collective decision making situations, agents vote to choose an alternative that best represents the preferences of the group. Agents may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In real world voting scenarios, people often do not have complete information about other v...

In this paper, we review basic findings from experimental studies in judgment and decision making that could contribute to designing policies and trainings to enhance police decision making. Traditional judgment and decision-making research has focused on simple choices between hypothetical gambles, which has been criticized for its lack of general...

A concurrent, construct validity study was conducted to compare responses from a traditional personality instrument to responses from a game-like instrument designed to assess personality. Personality assessment research demonstrates that misleading and careless responses typically stem from lack of internal motivation or interest in the task. To a...

In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote for as many candidates as they wish. Winners are chosen by tallying up the votes and choosing the top-$k$ candi...

A major goal of Gardner, Ryan, and Snoeyink (2018) was to determine what steps are needed moving forward in examining gender representation in industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology. Specifically, on the topic of pay differences, we highlight that gender differences in pay are in part due to differences in negotiation behaviors and/or exper...

In this paper, we explore the relationships between psychometric and behavioral measures of maximization in decisions from experience (DfE). In two experiments, we measured choice behavior in two experimental paradigms of DfE and self-reported maximizing tendencies using three prominent scales of maximization. In the repeated consequentialist choic...

Understanding stock‐flow relationships is fundamental to the management of operational systems. In their most basic form, stock‐flow systems consist of resources that accumulate and flows that change their level. Managing stock‐flow systems is an indispensable part of operations management, including supply chain, inventory, and capacity planning....

The Allais Paradox is a well-known bias in which people's preferences result in contradictory choices between two normatively identical gamble pairs. Studies have shown that these preference reversals depend on how information is described and presented. In an experiment, we investigate the Allais gambles in several formats including an experientia...

The trust that humans place on recommendations is key to the success of recommender systems. The formation and decay of trust in recommendations is a dynamic process influenced by context, human preferences, accuracy of recommendations, and the interactions of these factors. This paper describes two psychological experiments (N=400) that evaluate t...

Evaluation judgments were affected by information order and not by subsequent unconscious versus conscious deliberation. In three experiments, we examined the influence of early positive information on final evaluations of four objects. Based on a task analysis, we predicted primacy effects in judgments in a sequential data acquisition task. Thinki...

The web has evolved in a scale free manner, with available information about different entities developing in different forms, different locations, and at massive scales. This paper addresses the cognitive limitations that information analysts typically experience as they approach the boundaries where automated analysis algorithms are sorely needed...

Differences in decision making between individuals differing in Need for Cognition (NFC) are examined using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Previous work using normative one time decisions suggests that individual low in NFC process gains and losses differently than those high in NFC and are more susceptible to decision biases. The IGT is a popular l...

In our previous letter-matching experiments with native English and Japanese readers employing phonograms as stimuli, physical-matching reaction times (RTs) for Japanese readers were the shortest. We hypothesized that the heavy reliance of Japanese readers on visual codes in processing Kanji dominant texts extends to the processing of phonograms, w...