Dr. Qian is trained in Cognitive Psychology, with an emphasis on mathematical models of memory and cognition. She has worked on the intersection between economics, psychology and marketing. In her doctoral thesis, she developed a general mathematical model of contextual judgment, which have been applied to both consumer price perception in marketing and wage satisfaction in labor economics. During her two-year postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institute in Berlin, she worked closely with cognitive scientists, psychologists, economists, biologists, engineers, and sociologists in a truly inter-disciplinary environment, on the understanding of rationality and human decision making. These experiences formed her academic identity of addressing research questions with multi-disciplinary insights as well as unconventional quantitative rigor. In 2008-2009, she joined the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University, working with Prof. Eric Johnson in the department of marketing and Prof. Elke Weber in the department of Management. They worked on understanding the cognitive mechanisms that influence decision making, especially those fundamental to Behavioral Economics. In measuring Crystalized and Fluid Intelligence, they created a diverse repertoire containing classical neuropsychological tests and cognitive games. Dr. Qian joined the Psychology Department at Tsinghua University as an assistant professor in 2009. Her current research focuses on dynamic decision making in groups and social cognition.
Education background
University of Warwick, UK October 2001 – September 2005
Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
Thesis: Economic Psychophysics: Theories and Applications.
Advisors: Gordon D.A. Brown (Psychology) , Evan Heit (Psychology), Andrew Oswald (Economics)
Beijing Foreign Studies University, China September 1997 – July 2001
B.Sc. in Economics and Business
B.A. in English
Experience
Research Scientist at Center for Decision Sciences, Columbia University, New York, USA.
- Work on National Institute of Aging funded grant “Decision-Making over the Life Span”
- Conduct experiments related to behavioral decision making and cognitive function
- Using virtual lab to collect and manage complex web-based experiments, managing web developers
-Program complex analyses and computations in MATLAB and R
• MPI for Human Development, Berlin, Germany October 2005 – December 2007
Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
- Developed parsimonious decision strategies and compared against complex models
- Developed mathematical models of contextual judgement and magnitude estimation
- Ran complex simulations and developed theories and models of social cognition
Concurrent Academic
Tsinghua University December 2009 – Present
Assistant Professor at Department of Psychology
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Research on Judgment and Decision Making
Teach undergraduate courses on “Psychology and life” ,”Psychometrics”and “Behavioral Economics”;
Teach postgraduate courses on “Judgement and Decision Making”
Social service
Freshmen mentor for undergraduate students at the department
Director of the Eye-movement laboratory
Advisor for Class 2010 (20 students)
Areas of Research Interests/ Research Projects
Psychology of judgement and decision making
Human factors in information processing and decision strategies
Statistics, psychometrics, and quantitative modeling
Mathematical models of economic and social judgement
Marketing management and consumer behavior, Neuroeconomics
Honors And Awards
Poster Prize in Bounded Rationality Summer School, Berlin, Germany, August 2004.
Warwick Postgraduate Research Fellow, October 2001 – July 2004.
Overseas Reasearch Scheme Award, October 2001 – July 2004.
Grindley Grant for conference attendance at Psychonomics and JDM Annual Meetings (awarded by Experimental Psychology Society), November 2003.
Academic Achievement
PUBLISHED WORK
Qian, J. & Brown, G.D.A. (2005). Similarity-based sampling: Testing a model of price psychophysics. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1785–1790). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Qian, J. & Garcia-Retemero, R. (2007). A sampling explanation for the formation of social stereotypes. Proceedings of the 2nd European Cognitive Science Conference (pp. 676-681). Hove, UK: Erlbaum.
Brown, G.D.A., Gardner, J., Oswald, A. & Qian, J. (2008). Does wage rank affect employee’s wellbeing? Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 47(3), 355-389. (authorship in alphabetical order).
Qian, J. & Brown, G.D.A. (2009). The sequential effects and anchoring in price judgment. Annals of Economics and Fiance, 10-S, 165–177.
WORK UNDER REVIEW
Qian, J, & Brown, G.D.A. (revise and resubmit). Integrating context effects and loss aversion: A GEMS model of price perception. Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Brown, G.D.A. & Qian, J. (revise and resubmit). The origin of probability weighting: A psychophysical approach. Journal of Economic Psychology.
CONFERENCES
Qian, J., Johnson, E.J., & Weber, E.U. The effect of age in Decision Making. Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, Boston, MA, November 2009.
Qian, J. & Weber, E.U. The effect of age and gender in domain-specific risk taking. Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, Chicago, IL, November 2008.
Qian, J. & Olsson, H. The effect of information distribution on the communication of magnitudes. Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, Long Beach, CA, November 2007.
Qian, J. & Garcia-Retemero, R. Stereotype formation due to sampling asymmetry. Talk given on the 21th conference on Subjective Probability, Utility and Decision Making (SPUDM), Warsaw, Poland, August 2007.
Qian, J. & Garcia-Retemero, R. A sampling explanation for the formation of social stereotypes. The 2nd European Cognitive Science Conference, Delphi, Greece, May 2007.
Qian, J. & Brown, G.D.A. A further investigation in Probability Weighting. Poster presented at the Annual meeting of the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, Houston, TA, November 2006.
Qian, J. The effect of information distribution on the communication in advice taking. Poster presented at ATDM (Advice and Trust in Decision Making) conference in London, UK, June 2006.
Qian, J. Generalised Exemplar Model of Sampling: Modeling propensity and contextual sensitivity for risks and utility. Computer-driven presentation given at FUR XII conference in Rome, Italy, June 2006.
Qian, J. & Brown, G.D.A. A psychophysical explanation of the Probability Weighting Function. Poster presented at Psychonomics 46th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Canada, November 2005.
Qian, J. & Brown, G.D.A. Similarity-based sampling: Testing a model of price psychophysics. Poster presented at the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Turin, Italy, July 2005.
Qian, J., Brown, G.D.A. & Oswald, A. Economic Psychophysics: Rank Dependence in Pay Satisfaction. Poster presented at Bounded Rationality Summer School, Berlin, Germany, August 2004.
Qian, J. Economic psychophysics: Studies on wage satisfaction and price perception. Talk given on 28th International Congress of Psychology (ICP 2004), Beijing, China, August 2004.
Brown, G.D.A., Gardner, J., Oswald, A. & Qian, J. Rank dependence in pay satisfaction. Poster presented at Annual meeting of the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, Vancouver, Canada, November 2003.
Qian, J. & Brown, G.D.A. Price perception: Evidence for multiple reference points. Poster presented at Psychonomics 44th Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, November, 2003.
ELSE/ABC Judgment and Decision Making Workshop, University College of London, UK, June 2003.
Qian, J. Contextual effect in probability weighting. Poster presented at MRC postgraduate workshop, York University, UK, June 2002.
Australian Cognitive Science Conference, Fremantle, Australia, April 2002.
