BIOGRAPHY

Tim's undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences (mathematics and psychology) from the University of Durham. Following some years teaching in London, Tim returned to university to obtain an MSc in Research Methods for Psychology at University College London. His PhD (also at UCL) was on pre-surgical judgement and decision making in paediatric cardiac surgery, focussing on doctors' pre-operative risk assessment and their choice between different heart operations. He was appointed as a teaching fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex in 2000, and became a lecturer in 2004, and a senior lecturer in 2007.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Most of my research interests are in the area of judgement and decision making – a field that draws upon ideas from psychology, economics and statistics, which is also referred to as behavioural decision making. My work has focused mostly on multi-attribute choice, multiple-cue judgement, and understanding human judgement and decision making involving risk or uncertainty. More specific interests include: pre-decisional information acquisition, strategies for choice, decisions from experience, the role of memory in judgement and choice, the presentation and understanding of information about risk and uncertainty, reasoning with probabilities, behavioural finance, the elicitation of probabilities from experts, fast-and-frugal heuristics, inter-temporal choice, and the comparison of intuitive and rule-based judgement. Some of my current collaborations explore issues such as the distinction between description-based and experience-based decisions, the role of unconscious processes in decision making, and the presentation of risk information in medicine. My enthusiasm for data analysis has resulted in additional collaborations outside these core areas of interests

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Rakow, T., Wright, R.J., Bull, K., Spiegelhalter, D.J. (2012). Simple and multi-state survival curves: Can people learn to use them? Medical Decision Making, DOI: 10.1177/0272989X12451057

Yechiam, E., & Rakow, T. (2012). The effect of foregone outcomes on choices from experience: An individual level modeling analysis. Experimental Psychology, 59, 55-67. abstract

Newell, B.R., & Rakow, T. (2011). Revising beliefs about the merit of unconscious thought: Evidence in favor of the null hypothesis? Social Cognition, 29, 711-726. link to paper

Rakow, T. (2010). Risk, uncertainty and prophet: The psychological insights of Frank H. Knight. Judgment and Decision Making, 5, 458-466. link to paper

Rakow, T., Newell, B.R., & Zougkou, K. (2010). The role of working memory in information acquisition and decision making: Lessons from the binary prediction task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1335-1360. abstract

Rakow, T., & Newell, B.R. (2010). Degrees of uncertainty: An overview and framework for future research on experience-based choice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 23, 1-14. abstract

Rakow, T., & Miler, K. (2009). Doomed to repeat the successes of the past: History is best forgotten for repeated choices with non-stationary payoffs. Memory and Cognition, 37, 985-1000. abstract

Rakow, T., Demes, K.A., & Newell, B.R. (2008). Biased samples not mode of presentation: Re-examining the apparent underweighting of rare events in experience-based choice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 106, 168-179. abstract

Click for a full list of publications

TEACHING

PS115 Statistics for Psychologists (Year 1)

PS475 Judgement and Decision Making (Year 3)

WEBLINKS

Society for Judgment and Decision Making:

European Association for Decision Making:

Society for Medical Decision Making

Brunswik Society:

The Chance Website:

London Judgement and Decision Making Group:

Centre for Decision Research at Leeds University:

Hothand Research

ACADEMIC ACTIVITY

Associate Editor: Thinking and Reasoning

Editorial Board: Journal of Behavioral Decision Making