Sam Johnson

Dr. Johnson is a cognitive scientist of markets, who aims to understand how the mental processes of individuals contribute to emergent social orders, including economic and political systems. He was awarded his PhD in Psychology from Yale University in 2017, where he studied reasoning and decision-making. His dissertation, which received prizes from the Cognitive Science Society and the American Psychological Association, focused on cognitive processes that help adults and children to understand the world across diverse contexts, including causal thinking, stereotyping, moral judgment, mathematical reasoning, object classification, mental-state inference, and decision-making. He has published 8 journal articles and nearly two dozen conference papers and book chapters on these and related topics.

At the CSDU, Dr. Johnson uses the tools of experimental cognitive science to understand how people use causal, explanatory, and narrative thinking to inform their choices in both financial and non-financial contexts. In addition to his ongoing work at the CSDU, Dr. Johnson began working in September 2017 as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Marketing, Business, & Society at the University of Bath School of Management.

Dr. Johnson's website and blog can be accessed at www.sgbjohnson.com, and he can be reached at sgbjohnson@gmail.com