Topic

With more companies using machine learning to offer advice, leading behavioral scientists are beginning to study whether people will heed the advice of algorithms. In her latest research, Dr. Minson of Harvard University conducts six separate experiments that show people tend to heed the advice more from algorithms than from people. This contradicts earlier work indicating scepticism over algorithmic advice.

Featured Speaker

Julia Minson is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of government. She is a social psychologist with research interests in group judgment and decision-making, negotiations, and social influence. Her primary line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement”: How do people engage with opinions, judgments, and decisions that are different from their own?

She explores this theme in the context of group decision-making to uncover the psychological biases that prevent managers, consumers, and policy-makers from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. She also studies the conditions that make people willing to listen and be receptive to views and opinions they strongly oppose on political and social topics.

Julia is the organizer of the Colloquium on Research Results in Advancing Leadership (CORRAL) speaker series, sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership and the Management Leadership and Decision Sciences Area. She is also Faculty Director of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory.

Prior to coming to the Kennedy School, Julia served as a Lecturer at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she taught Negotiations at both the MBA and the undergraduate levels. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University and her BA in Psychology from Harvard University.