Kristine Cho ’21 is interested in judgment and decision making, and her research at Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley focuses on questions such as when and why people infer more than the literal meaning of a statement—and how this impacts decision making—as well as cognitive biases and heuristics.
Cho, who’s in her fifth year of a behavioral marketing Ph.D., returned to Pomona earlier this fall to speak about her recently published research in a talk titled “Doubling-Back Aversion.”
We caught up with Cho to ask about her studies at Pomona and her path to business school. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.
Why did you choose Pomona College?
I was born in the U.S. but moved to Singapore at an early age. My school was very small, very supportive, very noncompetitive. I valued people being kind to each other. As I looked at colleges, Pomona stood out in terms of that kind of community where everyone helps each other.
How did you land on a psychology major and decision making as a focus?
In high school, I took psychology for four years. I was very interested in the scientific method. I like thinking about cause and effect: you manipulate this variable and then this happens, but you have to control it to test the causal relationship. I liked that experimental method, and it was very cool to apply that to understanding human behavior.
I took Intro to Psychology first semester with Professor Richard Lewis. Even though I took psychology for four years in high school, I learned so much from the breadth of topics and the depth that was taught in that class. That’s where I learned decision making. I thought, “This really speaks to me.” You manipulate conditions in a very controlled way, sometimes changing just one word, and then people’s behavior changes incredibly.
After that class, Professor Shlomi Sher kindly helped advise me for an independent research project I wanted to do about decision making. It’s amazing that even in your first or second year, a professor is willing to help you conduct independent research.
Along with a psychological science major, I minored in computer science. Ever since I was young, I really liked thinking about patterns, even literally, like looking at wallpaper and trying to find the smallest repeating unit. Psychology speaks to that in terms of cause and effect. Computer science does that in terms of “you change this logic.”
Why business school for your Ph.D.?
I had better luck finding professors who are doing specifically the type of judgment and decision making that I had been interested in in business schools. Technically, it’s consumer behavior or consumer psychology. It’s understanding how people make decisions. I chose Berkeley specifically because they have a wide range of research in decision making: “How do people perceive uncertainty in general? How do people perceive risk?” They have a broad spectrum that overlaps heavily with psychology.
How did Pomona prepare you for graduate school?
The small class sizes and being able to develop relationships with professors are strengths of Pomona. I benefited a lot from that: not having to fight for the attention of professors, being able to say, “I’m a first year, help me!”
A liberal arts education was extremely helpful for me to be able to know my research interests. At least in the fields that I’m in, when you’re interested in grad school, it’s very much an apprenticeship model. Your professor is doing something, you learn a lot from them and you continue their work. Pomona actively encourages you to explore lots of different interests. In this environment, we’re able to combine different interests and learn about them in a rigorous environment. It is rare, and helpful, to not just say, “I’m interested in psychology” or “I’m interested in cognitive psychology” but “I’m interested in applying this algorithm I learned in my computer science class to understanding human decision making.”
There are lots of different fields that you can’t even imagine. I didn't know that there were so many different questions that people were examining. I think it’s harder to develop an understanding of the multiple fields necessary for answering those questions just by taking psychology and nothing else at the undergraduate level. The exposure to different disciplines and knowing what you like really gives you that edge in researching these specific questions.