MAKING SURE THE REVIEWERS REFLECT THE MEMBERSHIP

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Perhaps because it is an election year in the US, we’ve been thinking a lot about proportional representation.

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) is a diverse academic society, with people coming from about seven academic fields (or groups of related fields). See above.

Nina Mazar (SJDM Program Committee Chair) and Dan Goldstein (SJDM President) have been thinking about the following question: What can we do to help assure the papers accepted to the SJDM conference reflect the interests of the membership?

This lead to the “representative reviewer project”. Based on the membership chart above and a simple R script, we tested candidate sets of reviewers to see how well they matched the interests of the society. We tweaked the set of reviewers until we got as close as we could to proportional representation of fields.

We’ve sent out invitations to a representative set of reviewers. If you’ve been invited, please say “yes”. You’re representing a whole category of researcher.

We keep saying “representative”, but one might ask “representative of what?” The survey of the membership just includes faculty (as opposed to students members) who have paid dues in the last three years. So it’s a bit backward looking, which is okay. If the society is going to change focus, it should do so slowly. We at the Decision Science News feel that the Society for Judgment and Decision Making should be about judgment and decision making. If one is not careful, the field can run away from it’s name, like how the field of social psychology is no longer about social psychology.

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