Researcher Feature: Dr. Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, Ohio State University

July 18, 2024

We recently reached out to Dr. Brittany Shoots-Reinhard, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University, to chat about her research on decision-making and her enthusiasm for Decision Education. Dr. Shoots-Reinhard took part in our Decision Education Research Collaborative, which brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with a shared interest in Decision Education.

The Alliance is proud to support researchers as they engage with Decision Education and work on improving decision-making for children and adolescents.

Please introduce yourself, your education and research background, and how you became involved with the Research Collaborative and the Alliance.

I have a Ph.D. in social psychology from Ohio State University. I studied attitudes and persuasion and decision-making as a graduate student. I currently have two main streams of research. First, I’m interested in how people process information (e.g., numeric information, persuasive messages, graphs) and how that information influences their beliefs, opinions, and behavior. In addition to varying the information, I’m also interested in how prior beliefs and opinions (e.g., political ideology) and cognitive ability (e.g., numeric ability) influence information processing via accuracy and directional motivation. Second, I’m interested in how cognitive abilities, such as numeracy, and people’s perceptions of their abilities, such as numeric self-efficacy, influence their decisions and life outcomes. These research interests align very well with the Alliance and its focus on cognitive abilities and decision outcomes, so I was excited to join the Research Collaborative.

What research are you working on right now? What are you hopeful that your research will do?

I’m currently working on investigating the interplay between prior beliefs and ability and how they influence motivated reasoning. We’re seeing that verbal ability is related to directionally motivated reasoning (e.g., political polarization in judgments and opinions) and that numeric ability is related to accuracy (e.g., lower risk perceptions, greater judgmental accuracy). We’re hoping that this can help us better understand when and for whom polarization is occurring and ultimately reduce it through better, more targeted interventions. In the second line of work, we’re interested in a heuristic effect of numeric self-efficacy that may cause people to disengage from numeric tasks and make worse judgments. We’re also hoping to identify how mismatches in numeracy and numeric self-efficacy occur and whether calibrating self-efficacy to numeracy can improve life outcomes.

What do you find engaging and exciting about Decision Education and its applicability? How do you think it will impact students’ skill development? 

My collaborators and I have shown how much thinking probabilistically matters for academic and life outcomes, yet we [the educational system] focus on other types of math skills and neglect probabilistic thinking. I think this is detrimental for students, and Decision Education’s goals will increase the numeracy of high school graduates, increasing the financial and physical health of the population as a whole. In addition, I think that some of the skills that Decision Education teaches to encourage open-minded thinking may be precisely the interventions needed to shift people from directional to accuracy motivations when processing information. Most of our work has been done on adults, so it will be exciting to test our expectation that these interventions have more “bang for their buck” if introduced earlier in development.

“My collaborators and I have shown how much thinking probabilistically matters for academic and life outcomes, yet we [the educational system] focus on other types of math skills and neglect probabilistic thinking.”

What impact on society do you think there will be when the Alliance succeeds in its mission to bring Decision Education into schools so that it’s part of every student’s learning experience?

My own research has documented many positive effects of numeric ability for decision-making, health, financial, and academic outcomes, so I have no doubt that increasing young people’s ability to think probabilistically will help them make better, more accurate decisions, which will translate into a society with better financial, health, and academic outcomes.

Learn more about the Decision Education Research Collaborative here.

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