Ola Svenson, Ph.D.
Ola Svenson is professor emeritus at Stockholm University and senior research scientist at Decision Research. He is one of the pioneers who introduced a process perspective and the think-aloud method in behavioral decision research. He was one of the founders of the European Group for Process Tracing of Decision Making, EGPROC and the group has met annually since 1981. Dr. Svenson discovered the time saving bias and published a seminal paper on self-perception, “Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?”, that has been quite influential and cited more than 2,500 times over the years. Svenson’s Differentiation and Consolidation theory is a comprehensive coherence decision theory modeling decision processes which have come into focus during the last two decades. His research also includes studies of mental arithmetics, risk analysis, traffic safety and nuclear safety. Dr. Svenson is a past president and board member of the European Association for Decision Making. He has been a member of the board of the U. S. Society for Risk Analysis, was an honorary member of that society and received its European Distinguished Achievement Award in 1997.
Current Research
Dr. Svenson’s ongoing research includes analyses of cognitive biases, studies of judgment distributions that reveal different judgment rules, decision makers’ mental reactions after having been informed that they made the wrong choice, tests of the validity of human interval judgments, a project on knowledge resistance, and studies of perceptions of Coronavirus exposure at different distances from an infected person with or without a face mask.
Recent Publications
Gonzalez, N., Svenson, O., Ekström, M., Kriström, B., & Nilsson, M. E. (2022). Self-selected interval judgments compared to point judgments: A weight judgment experiment in the presence of the size-weight illusion. PLOS ONE, 17(3), Article e0264830. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264830
Svenson, O. (2021). Biased judgments of the effects of speed change on travel time, fuel consumption and braking: Individual differences in the use of simplifying rules producing the same biases. Transportation Research Part F, 78, 398–409. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2021.02.014
Svenson, O., Appelbom, S., Mayorga, M., & Lindholm Öjmyr, T. (2020). Without a mask: Judgments of Corona virus exposure as a function of inter personal distance. Judgment and Decision Making, 15(6), 881–888.
Svenson, O., & Borg, A. (2020). On the human inability to process inverse variables in intuitive judgments: Different cognitive processes leading to the time loss bias. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 32(3), 344–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2020.1739694
Svenson, O., Isohanni, F., Salo, I., & Lindholm, T. (2024). Airborne SARS-CoV2 virus exposure, interpersonal distance, face mask and perceived risk of infection. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 2285.
Ranyard, R., & Svenson, O. (2019). Verbal reports and decision process analysis. In M. Schultze-Mecklenbeck, A. Küberger, & J. G. Johnson (Eds.), A handbook of process tracing methods (2nd ed.). London, UK: Routledge.
