Christoph Ungemach
Research Affiliate
cungemach@gmx.de
Dr. Christoph Ungemach received his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Warwick (UK) in June 2008. In his dissertation he investigated decision making under risk and uncertainty involving small probability outcomes and evaluated how existing choice models can account for the different behavior observed in experiential and descriptive choice paradigms.
After his Ph.D., Christoph worked for three years as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick investigating the role of the decision environment in decision making under risk. Using a wide range of experiments in the lab and field his work showed that preferences are constructed from comparisons with samples from memory. These results challenge standard economic theories and provide support for psychological models like decision-by-sampling.
His current research focuses on choice architecture related to environmentally-relevant decisions, investigating how structural features of decision environments can trigger different choice processes and behavior. This work will evaluate potential cognitive and motivational interventions and how they can be combined in order to overcome documented decision biases and encourage individuals to make better environmental decisions (e.g. reducing their energy consumption or carbon emissions). Christoph was formerly a postdoctoral research scientist and Associate Research Scientist at CRED.
Representative Publications:
Ungemach, C., Stewart, N., & Reimers, S. (2011). How incidental values from the environment affect decisions about money, risk, and delay. Psychological Science, 22, 253–260.
Ungemach, C., Chater, N., & Stewart, N. (2009). Are probabilities overweighted or underweighted, when rare outcomes are experienced (rarely)? Psychological Science, 20, 473-479.