Jonathan Baron

Jonathan Baron (born 1944) is an American psychologist. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making.

Early life and education Baron was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1944, and received a B.A. in psychology from Harvard University in 1966 and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1970 for his thesis titled The threshold for successiveness.

Career Baron is the founding editor of the open-access journal Judgment and Decision Making and has been on the editorial boards of several other journals. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Psychological Science, and was the president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making for 2006–2007.

Notable contributions Baron's work has occurred primarily within the field of judgment and decision making, a multi-disciplinary area that applies psychology to problems in economics, law, business, and public policy. This field began by contrasting human decision behavior with theories of individual decision-making and judgment, such as probability theory and expected utility. Baron's research has extended the focus of judgment and decision making to social problems of resource allocation and ethical decisions. Among the concepts associated with his work are omission bias (the tendency for people to excuse acts of omission more easily than acts of commission) and protected values (principles on which people are unwilling to accept trade-offs).

Baron is author of Thinking and Deciding, a text that takes on the task of examining psychological research directed at a comprehension of the nature of thinking as he sees it. In this text, Baron covers such topics as risk, bioethics, Bayes' theorem, utility measurement, decision analysis, and values. The text takes a broad-based, introductory-level view to the field of psychological decision theory.

He has also authored Morality and Rational Choice, Against Bioethics, and Judgment Misguided.

Additionally, he is the editor of Teaching Decision Making to Adolescents and Psychological Perspectives on Justice (with Barbara Mellers).

Baron's Ph.D. students have included Rebecca Treiman, Hal Pashler and Jonathan Haidt.