Jiuqing Cheng, Council Nominee

Institutional affiliation: University of Northern Iowa

Area of specialization: Cognitive Psychology

Summary of professional interests:

My research focuses on judgment and decision-making. Specifically, in recent years, my research aims to examine how cognitive related characteristics and choice setting play a role in a variety of judgment and decision-making tasks. Currently there are two lines of my research. The first line aims to advance the understanding of health-related behaviors. For instance, my student and I examined how need for cognition, numeracy, and message framing affected people’s decision on adopting preventative measures in the Covid-19 pandemic. The second line of my research focuses on economic behaviors in everyday life. For example, as choice overload prevails (just imagine how many products you end up with when tying a few words in Amazon), in recent research my student and I examined how choice overload led to negative decision experience. Moreover, we also tested the moderating role of numeracy in choice overload and found that good numeric ability could mitigate the negative effect of choice overload.

Representative publications:

Peterson, N., & Cheng, J. (2022). Decision experience in hyperchoice: The role of numeracy and age differences. Current Psychology, 41, 5399-5411.

Steffen, J., & Cheng, J. (2021). The Influence of Gain-Loss Framing and Its  Interaction with Political Ideology on Social Distancing and Mask Wearing Compliance During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Current Psychology. Online first: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02148-x

Xu, P., & Cheng, J. (2021). Individual Differences in Social Distancing and Mask-Wearing in the Pandemic of COVID-19: The Role of Need for Cognition, Self-control and Risk Attitude. Personality and Individual Differences, 175,110706.

Xu, P., Cheng, J., & Sang, H. (2022). The effect of risk on inter-temporal choice and preference reversal. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. Online first: https://doi.org/10.1002/jeab.732

Cheng, J., & González -Vallejo, C. (2016). Attribute-wise Mechanism vs Alternative-wise Mechanism in Intertemporal Choice: Testing the Proportional Difference Model, Trade-off Model and Hyperbolic Model. Decision. 3(3), 190-215.

Representative honors or awards:

University of Northern Iowa Pre-tenure Outstanding Teaching Award (2021)

Involvement in MPA:

Since 2011, I have made 12 conference presentations (talks and posters) at MPA. I was invited to give a talk in 2019. Currently I am serving on the MPA program committee. As a committee member, I review the submitted abstract and help build the conference program.