Joseph Simmons
· Professor of Operations, Information and DecisionsUniversity of Pennsylvania · Operations and Information Management
Active 1972–2026
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
About
Joseph Simmons is the Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Applied Statistics and a Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. His research primarily investigates the psychology of judgment and decision-making, focusing on understanding and addressing errors and biases that affect people's judgments, predictions, and choices. His work explores topics such as advice taking, algorithm aversion, anchoring effects, consumer rating systems, forecasting biases, the illusion of control, intuitive biases, optimistic biases, outcome bias, and the wisdom of crowds. In addition to his psychological research, Simmons is renowned for his contributions to research methods. Alongside colleagues Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn, he has dedicated over 16 years to identifying and remedying research practices that contribute to false-positive findings and a perverse incentive structure in scientific publishing. His efforts include exposing p-hacking, developing tools like the p-curve for assessing evidential value, creating pre-registration platforms used by thousands of researchers, and establishing websites for posting research materials and data. Simmons is also a co-founder of the Wharton Credibility Lab, which provides online platforms to enhance research credibility. His work aims to improve the reliability and integrity of scientific research through systematic replication, transparency, and methodological innovation.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Psychology
- Mathematics
- Computer Security
- Information Retrieval
- Political Science
- Statistics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Medicine
- Data science
Selected publications
Nature Human Behaviour · 2020-07-27 · 559 citations
articleAbove averaging in literature reviews
Nature Reviews Psychology · 2022 · 51 citations
Does Choice Cause an Illusion of Control?
Psychological Science · 2021-01-05 · 32 citations
articleSenior authorPrevious research suggests that choice causes an illusion of control—that it makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes, even when they are selecting among options that are functionally identical (e.g., lottery tickets with an identical chance of winning). This research has been widely accepted as evidence that choice can have significant welfare effects, even when it confers no actual control. In this article, we report the results of 17 experiments that examined whether choic…
Social and Personality Psychology Compass · 2024-07-01 · 12 citations
articleOpen accessAbstract The replication crisis and subsequent credibility revolution in psychology have highlighted many suboptimal research practices such as p ‐hacking, overgeneralizing, and a lack of transparency. These practices may have been employed reflexively but upon reflection, they are hard to defend. We suggest that current practices for reporting and discussing study limitations are another example of an area where there is much room for improvement. In this article, we call for more rigorous repo…
The Psychology of Second Guesses: Implications for the Wisdom of the Inner Crowd
Management Science · 2021-03-23 · 11 citations
articleSenior authorPrior research suggests that averaging two guesses from the same person can improve quantitative judgments, a phenomenon known as the “wisdom of the inner crowd.” In this article, we find that this effect hinges on whether people explicitly decide in which direction their first guess had erred before making their second guess. In nine studies (N = 8,465), we found that asking people to explicitly indicate whether their first guess was too high or too low before making their second guess made peo…
Frequent coauthors
- 83 shared
Leif D. Nelson
- 34 shared
Uri Simonsohn
University of Pennsylvania
- 34 shared
Jeff Galak
Carnegie Mellon University
- 34 shared
Robyn A. LeBoeuf
Washington University in St. Louis
- 11 shared
Cade Massey
University of Pennsylvania
- 10 shared
Celia Gaertig
University of California, Berkeley
- 9 shared
Hannah Perfecto
Washington University in St. Louis
- 6 shared
Berkeley J. Dietvorst
University of Chicago
Awards & honors
- Wharton Credibility Lab (co-founder)
Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Joseph Simmons
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup