Robin M. Hogarth

Robin Miles Hogarth (born July 10, 1942) is a British-American psychologist and emeritus professor in the Department of Economics and Business at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

He has served as president of both the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and the European Association for Decision Making.

His previous positions include ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Wallace W. Booth Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago.

Hogarth was born in Simla, India to British parents and schooled in Scotland at Glasgow Academy and Fettes College.

He did not attend university as an undergraduate but trained to become a Chartered Accountant (1965) by serving an apprenticeship.

He subsequently earned an MBA at INSEAD (1968) in Fontainebleau, France and, sponsored by a Harkness Fellowship, went on to gain a PhD at the University of Chicago (1972) under the supervision of Hillel J. Einhorn who had a major influence on his development and subsequent career but tragically died from cancer at age 45 in 1987.

Hogarth was a faculty member at INSEAD (1972-1979), the Booth School at the University of Chicago (1979-2001), and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (2001–present).

At Chicago Booth, he was Director of the Center for Decision Research (1983-1993), and Deputy Dean (1993-1998).

Hogarth’s work centers on the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Together with Einhorn, he published several key papers that helped establish the standing of a new area within psychology.

Among other contributions were analyses of the role of rationality in decision making, the use of simple models, learning (and not learning) from experience, effects of ambiguity in decision making, and the probabilistic nature of causal judgments.

In 1985, Hogarth, together with economist Melvyn W. Reder, organized a 2-day conference at the University of Chicago on the topic of deviations from rational economic behavior.

The conference was marked by the participation of many leading scholars (including 9 winners or future winners of the Nobel prize) who debated the meaning of data that did not comply with the assumptions of economic theory and yet were consistent with some psychological principles.

This meeting and debate by highly qualified economists and psychologists has been recognized as an important milestone in the development of the disciplines of behavioral economics and behavioral finance.

Intrigued by the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues on the surprising efficacy of simple heuristic models for decision making, Hogarth undertook a series of theoretical analyses to understand why.

These investigations were important in defining the possibilities and limits of some simple heuristic methods and emphasized the importance of characterizing the nature of environmental conditions appropriately.

In 2001, Hogarth published Educating Intuition (University of Chicago Press), a book that reviewed the psychological literature on intuitive judgment and offered suggestions on how this could be improved or “educated.” Key to this is the issue of the conditions under which intuitive responses have been learned and these, according to Hogarth, can vary from kind to wicked.

Kind learning environments are characterized by repeated judgments and feedback that is both immediate and clear.

Under these conditions, people acquire appropriate responses, i.e., intuitions.

On the contrary, in wicked learning environments, feedback may be missing, slow, distorted or biased in other ways and the acquisition of appropriate responses is compromised.

The differential effects of kind and wicked learning environments can have important consequences and these have been used to explain many important phenomena.

In recent years, Hogarth has explored some of these in academic papers as well as a book.

Hogarth was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by University of Lausanne in 2007 and received the EADM Lifetime Contribution Award in 2023.