Nick Byrd
Dr. Nick Byrd is a quantitative cognitive scientist specializing in areas such as process tracing, survey methods, dual process theory, implicit bias, and decision-making about health, morality, religion, and politics. One topic that keeps Nick up at night is reflective reasoning:
- What makes people step back from their initial impulses to think more carefully?
- What good is reflective thinking?
- How does reflection differ from similar constructs like rumination?
- And how can technology support or suppress reflective thinking?
With collaborators on six continents and generous support from public agencies like the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, philanthropic organizations like the John Templeton Foundation, and companies like CloudResearch, Dr. Byrd develops interventions to overcome cognitive biases, co-develops apps to scale up think-aloud and interactive experiments, and refines recruitment methods to improve data quality. The teams’ peer-reviewed articles in journals have reached the top 5% in terms of online attention from venues like Nature, NPR, and Forbes. Byrd has also written about topics such as artificial intelligence, decision-making, and ethics for outlets like Psychology Today and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Dr. Byrd served as an Intelligence Community postdoc. At Carnegie Mellon University and Stevens Institute of Technology after completing degrees at Florida State University, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He has been in or affiliated with departments of Artificial Intelligence, Bioethics and Decision Sciences, Philosophy, and Quantitative Social Science.
For the latest information about Dr. Byrd’s work, including access to free audio and text copies of his publications, visit ByrdNick.com.
