Eric Johnson is a faculty member at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. His research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing. Among other topics, Johnson has explored how the way options are presented to decision-makers affect their choices in areas such as organ donation, the choice of environmentally friendly products, and investments. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, he is one of the most highly cited scholars in Business and Economics.
Prof. Johnson’s research and comments have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Money, Discover, Business Week and The Financial Times, and on The CBS Evening News and National Public Radio. His publications have appeared in the Science, Psychological Review, Nature Neuroscience, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Economic Theory, and many other consumer, economic, marketing and psychology journals. He has co-authored two books: Decision Research: A Field Guide, published by Sage Publications and The Adaptive Decision-Maker published by Cambridge University Press.
After graduation from Rutgers University, he received his M.S. and PhD. in Psychology from Carnegie-Mellon University, and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. He previously has taught at Carnegie Mellon, was a visiting professor at the Sloan School at MIT, was the inaugural holder of the David W. Hauck Chair in Marketing, and a Professor of Operations and Information Management and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, The Alfred P. Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations, and the Office of Naval Research.
He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and is a member of several editorial boards as well as the Senior Editor for Decision Sciences at Behavioral Science and Policy.
Older adults have lower levels of fluid intelligence than younger adults, but decision-making studies show a mixed picture of performance over the lifespan: older adults often do worse but some studies find no difference or even better performance. We propose that age differences in decision performance result from the interplay between two sets of capabilities, one which finds worse performance for older adults (e.g., fluid intelligence and executive functions) and one on which older adults are better (e.g., crystallized intelligence). Specifically, we hypothesized that higher levels of crystallized intelligence help offset lower levels of fluid intelligence for older adults. The performance of older adults relative to younger adults depends on the relative importance of each capability for the decision task. We tested this compensating capabilities hypothesis in a broad sample of younger and older adults, collecting a battery of standard cognitive measures and measures of economically important decision-making “traits”— including temporal discounting, loss aversion, financial literacy, and debt literacy. We found that older participants performed as well as or better than younger participants on these four decision-making measures. Structural equation modeling revealed that fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and inhibitory control were significant partial mediators of decision-making age differences. Specifically, we found that older participants’ greater crystallized intelligence offset their lower levels of fluid intelligence for financial and debt literacy as well as temporal discounting, but not for loss aversion. These results have important implications for public policy and for the design of effective decision environments for older adults.
