Ori Plonsky

I am a behavioral scientist and a Senior Lecturer (assistant professor) at the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences at the Technion since 2020. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in behavioral sciences at the Technion, served as a researcher in The Israel Democracy Institute and was a post-doctoral associate in the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University.

My main research interests include:

Behavioral decision making
Human learning processes
Behavior modelling and behavior prediction
Topics on the boundary of data sciences and behavioral sciences
Behavioral economics
Applications of behavioral decision making to public policy
Behavioral mechanism design

If you’d like to know a bit more about (some of) my interests, you can watch this or this video (Prospective graduate students, see below)

From that time I wore a tie (my wedding day)

Prospective graduate students should watch this short video (in Hebrew, English subtitles) to get a sense of what I am looking for:

NEWS

January 2024. I was awarded the Technion Excellent Teacher Award (top 4% of student evaluations) for the 2022-3 Spring semester.

November 2023. I gave an invited seminar talk at the University of Exeter Economics department.

June 2023. Our book chapter “The J/DM separation paradox and the reliance on small samples hypothesis” is now published in “Sampling in Judgement and Decision Making.”

May 2023. I gave an invited talk at the “From Individual to Group Decision Making” conference at the Weitzmann Institute of Science.

April 2023. I became an Editorial Board Memeber in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

April 2023. Our conference paper “mRAPID Study: Effect of Micro-incentives and Daily Deadlines on Practice Behavior” is now published in the proceedings of Persuasive 2023.

April 2023. Proud of my student Or David Agassi, whose paper on “The Importance of Non-analytic Models in Decision Making Research: An Empirical Analysis using BEAST” was published in the Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 2023 (CogSci 2023).

April 2023. I gave a talk in the Decisions Experience and Behavior Seminar. The talk is now on Youtube

April 2023. Our paper “Contradictory deviations from maximization: Environment-specific biases, or reflections of basic properties of human learning?” is now published in Psychological Review

January 2023. Together with Michael Sobolev, we organized the first Technion Behavioral Data Science Symposium. The event attracted more than 100 participants and featured 15 different speakers and a poster session. Hopefully this will become an annual event.

December 2022. Our paper on “Motivational drivers for serial position effects: Evidence from high stakes legal decisions” is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology

November 2022. I was awarded the Technion Excellent Teacher Award (top 4% of student evaluations) for the 2021-2 Spring semester.

Novemver 2022. I participated in the Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Social Dynamics. A wonderful venue in which I presented an invited tutorial on “Predictably Irrational? Can behavioral decision making research help predict human choice?“

July 2022. I received the Israeli Science Foundation research grant for the proposal “Understanding and predicting behavior in games with rare events”

🎉😊February 2022. I was awarded the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award for 2021 for the paper “Best to Be Last: Serial Position Effects in Legal Decisions in the Field and in the Lab”. Since the submission to the award, the paper has changed its name and is now published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. I Gave the Einhorn Award lecture in SJDM Annual Meeting