Craig R. M. McKenzie

Professor of Management & Strategy and Professor of Psychology

Craig R. M. McKenzie is a professor of management in the Rady School and also a professor in the department of psychology at UC San Diego. He has been a faculty member at UC San Diego since receiving his Ph.D. in psychology in 1994 from the University of Chicago.

Professor McKenzie's research and teaching revolve around how people make decisions in the face of uncertainty, as well as how to help people make better decisions. Recent research projects include examining why merely rephrasing (or reframing) the available options can change people's decisions, how expertise benefits prediction, and how to get people to save more for retirement.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 1996, and he has won research awards from NSF, the Operations Research Society of America, and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals.

Recent Publications

• McKenzie, C. R. M., & Mikkelsen, L. A. (2007). A Bayesian view of covariation assessment. Cognitive Psychology, 54, 33-61. [pdf]
• Sher, S., & McKenzie, C. R. M. (2006). Information leakage from logically equivalent frames. Cognition, 101, 467-494. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M., Liersch, M. J., & Finkelstein, S. R. (2006). Recommendations implicit in policy defaults. Psychological Science, 17, 414-420. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M. (2006). Increased sensitivity to differentially diagnostic answers using familiar materials: Implications for confirmation bias. Memory and Cognition, 34, 577-588. [pdf]
• Roy, M. M., Christenfeld, N. J. S., & McKenzie, C. R. M. (2005). Underestimating the duration of future events: Memory incorrectly utilized or memory bias? Psychological Bulletin, 131, 738-756. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M. (2005). Judgment and decision making. In K. Lamberts & R. L. Goldstone (Eds.), Handbook of cognition (pp. 321-338). London: Sage. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M. (2004). Framing effects in inference tasks -- and why they are normatively defensible. Memory and Cognition, 32, 874-885. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M., Wixted, J. T., & Noelle, D. C. (2004). Explaining purportedly irrational behavior by modeling skepticism in task parameters: An example examining confidence in forced-choice tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 947-959. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M. (2004). Hypothesis testing and evaluation. In D. J. Koehler & N. Harvey (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 200-219). Oxford: Blackwell. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M. (2003). Rational models as theories -- not standards -- of behavior. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 403-406. [pdf]
• McKenzie, C. R. M., & Nelson, J. D. (2003). What a speaker's choice of frame reveals: Reference points, frame selection, and framing effects. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10, 596-602. [pdf]