School of Natural
Department of Psychology
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David
J. Weiss Office: KH D3087 |
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Introduction 
Teaching Interests List
of Published Papers (with links) Research Interests Educational Background Schedule & Office
Hours
Introduction
Fresh out of graduate school, I joined the CSULA Psychology Department in 1970. Early in my research career, I was interested in perceptual judgment. I withdrew from psychophysics after publishing a paper that argued against the possibility of finding a general psychophysical law (Weiss, D. J. (1981). The impossible dream of Fechner and Stevens. Perception, 10, 431-434).
I have always maintained my interest in measurement, defending ordinal data (Weiss, D. J. (1986). The discriminating power of ordinal data. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 1, 381-389) and insisting on a behavioral foundation for assessment of the effectiveness of programs designed to change health-related actions (Weiss, D. J., Walker, D. L., and Hill, D. (1988). The choice of a measure in a health-promotion study. Health Education Research: Theory and Practice, 3, 381-386). Several new statistical procedures stemmed from my interest in health psychology, including one for incomplete studies (Elder*, W. W., & Weiss, D. J. (1987). Snapshot: Analysis of variance with unequal numbers of scores per subject. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 47, 117-119) and another for coping with attrition (Weiss, D. J. (1991). A behavioral assumption for the analysis of missing data: The use of implanted zeroes. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6, 955-964). A quantitative way to decide whether attrition can reasonably be attributed to chance was presented in Weiss, D. J. (1999). An analysis of variance test for random attrition. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 13, 433-438. With Ward Edwards, I tackled the question of how to average responses, a topic that is not as simple as it would seem on the surface because behavioral responses carry more baggage than mere numbers do (Weiss, D. J., & Edwards, W. (2005). A mean for all seasons. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 677-683.) Years after arguing for the value of ordinal data, I went even farther in a paper illustrating how an experimenter can apply factorial analyses to nominal data (Weiss, D. J. (2009). Nominal analysis of “variance”. Behavior Research Methods, 901-908.)
My empirical interests evolved
toward matters of social judgment. Lisa Harris and I tested a model of the
way jurors might regard evidence in a rape trial (Harris*, L. R., & Weiss,
D. J. (1995). Judgments of consent in simulated rape cases. Journal
of Social Behavior and Personality, 10, 79-90). One of the key issues
in this kind of research is how to induce people to share feelings or personal
histories that they might consider embarrassing. Laurie Linden and I
tested the random response method (
I got drawn into health psychology by
Raymond Ulmer, the author of a great book on patient compliance, who at one
time taught part-time in the department. Ray’s encouragement led directly to a
speculative article on potential connections (Weiss, D. J. (1989). Potential
methodological contributions of mathematical psychology to patient compliance
research. Journal of Compliance in Health Care, 4, 95-100.), and
indirectly to a project on smoking (Hill, D., Weiss, D. J., Walker, D. L.,
& Jolley, D. (1988). Long-term evaluation of
controlled smoking as a treatment outcome. British Journal of Addiction, 83,
203-207) that I carried out during a sabbatical visit to
In 1998, I began a long-term
collaborative project with my office-mate from graduate school, James Shanteau of
An important application of this work is expertise exhibited by air traffic controllers; these early efforts were supported by the Federal Aviation Administration. Shanteau and I have published several papers and chapters, with our magnum opus appearing in a journal that emphasizes the applied value of psychological inquiry (Weiss, D. J., & Shanteau, J. (2003). Empirical assessment of expertise. Human Factors, 45, 104-116). We later extended our work to assessing expertise exhibited by teams, and also to professionals in domains in which objective performance criteria are usually unavailable (Weiss, D. J., Shanteau, J., & Harries, P. (2006). People who judge people. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 441-454. The CWS Web site contains a lot of information about our project.
I retired from full-time teaching in 2006. The links to my course websites, described below in the section on Teaching Interests, have been maintained in the hope that they still have value. Although I no longer take on students, I continue to do research. I began a new stream in collaboration with Jie Weiss, in which we developed a new version of the late Ward Edwards’s classic MAU model adapted for lifestyle decisions. Jie and I edited a book of Edwards’s body of work, which includes several recent papers on which I was a co-author. Another stream examines psychological responses to terrorism threat; that work is carried out in collaboration with Richard John of USC.
* = CSULA student at the time of our collaboration.
Teaching Interests
The class that I have taught most often is Psychology 302, our intermediate course in statistics. This course is required of all majors, and for good reason. One cannot hope to describe behavior without a language that includes probabilistic constructs. One of the special fascinations of our discipline is that the objects of study, people, exhibit tremendous variability in their actions. There is variation among different people, of course, but there is also variation within an individual's responses to the same situation. This makes describing the regularities in behavior a challenge.
I teach Psychology 302 using a lecture format, in which I present (lots of!) new information in each class. Following the class, there is a laboratory session. In the lab, students practice the techniques. During the first half of the course, the emphasis is on probability. Statistical inference is the global topic of the second half. The course grade is based solely on performance on the two exams. I have constructed a Web site to supplement the lecture and the textbook.
I also teach the statistics courses Psychology 414 and Psychology
515 annually. These courses focus on Analysis of Variance, my
favorite statistical technique. I present lectures on experimental design as
well as analytic techniques. In the classes, we use a set of statistical
programs I have written, the CALSTAT series, that is very user-friendly and
thereby allows students to focus on learning statistics rather than how to run
a program. I also wrote the text for these classes (the same book is used
in both). The text and a CD containing the programs are available together
in Weiss, D. J. (2006) Analysis of variance and functional measurement: A
practical guide.
The graduate seminar, Psychology 504, that I teach annually is especially intended for students planning to do a thesis. As listed in the catalog (Advanced Experimental Methods), the course is slightly mis-titled. I call the course Advanced Research Methods to emphasize that we discuss other methodologies as well. Course topics include issues in the use of human subjects, theories and model construction, and validity of measures. Questionnaire construction is a major focus. Statistics instruction is not a part of this course. Each student presents a proposed experiment in any domain (ungraded) to the class and subsequently submits a written version (graded). This format allows students to experience a little of what happens in a scientific meeting. An important goal is for students to learn both to give and to absorb professional, constructive, criticism. The class Web site has information of value to all graduate students.
Human Sexuality, Psychology 542, is another graduate seminar that I teach regularly. In addition to my personal fascination with the domain, sexual behavior presents interesting methodological challenges to the researcher. Obtaining honest reports from people about their sexual feelings and behaviors is problematic, especially from members of sub-cultures for whom sex is a taboo topic. As a researcher in judgment, I am interested in the decisions people make about what to do and about what they choose to share with the researcher. I am tremendously impressed with the courage demonstrated by Masters and Johnson, the pioneer empirical workers in the field, and by Kinsey, who first tried to survey people about these private behaviors. The format of the seminar is similar to the one I employ in Psychology 504. The class Web site has some interesting links...
Occasionally I present an idiosyncratic version of Psychology 501, the graduate seminar in perception. My slant is the perception of people, social perception. Topics include eyewitness identification, the study of faces, stereotyping and prejudice, and cultural variations. I view all of these as judgmental issues. The format of the seminar is similar to that of Psychology 504.
Computer programming is the subject of
Psychology 409. The goal of the course is
for each student to write a viable WINDOWS program of use to a psychologist. We program in VISUAL BASIC 6.0. This may be a teaching program, one
for presenting stimuli/gathering responses from subjects, or even a statistical
program. Other applications as
proposed by students will also be considered. No programming background is presumed. The grade is based on my
subjective evaluation of the program.
My personal web site provides information about WORD add-ins I have written and offer for sale. One of the programs is particularly useful for people who write manuscripts in APA style. I also present information about books I have published.
Research Interests
Research interests are among the following domains:
(1) How do people process
information in making decisions? Can these decisions be described by simple
algebraic models? Many of these studies employ functional measurement
methodology.
(2) How can researchers peer inside
people's heads? Are there techniques that allow us to explore events in their
personal histories? Can we quantify their opinions?
(3) How can we measure expertise? James Shanteau of
Within these domains, my students carry out research projects covering a wide range of topics. Recent examples include judgments about rape and child abuse, compliance with medical recommendations, the impact of physical attractiveness, and the revelation of sensitive information.
Representative Recent Publications
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Date |
Publications |
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2003 |
Weiss, D. J., & Shanteau, J. Empirical assessment of expertise. Human Factors, 45, 104-116. |
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2005 |
Weiss, D. J., & Edwards, W. A mean for all seasons. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 677-683. |
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2006 |
Weiss, D. J. Analysis
of variance and functional measurement: A practical guide. NY: |
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2006 |
Weiss, D. J., Shanteau, J., & Harries, P. People who judge people. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 441-454. |
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2007 |
Weiss, D. J. Extracting individual contributions to a team’s performance. Teorie e Modelli, 12, 227-236. |
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2009 |
Weiss, J. W., & Weiss, D. J. (Eds.) (2009). A science
of decision making: The legacy of Ward Edwards.
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2010 |
Weiss, J. W., Weiss, D. J., & Edwards, W. (2010). A descriptive multi-attribute utility model for everyday decisions. Theory and Decision, 68, 101-114. |
Educational Background
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Ph.D. Psychology 1973 |
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B.A. Psychology 1966 |
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Prepared by
tbell2@calstatela.edu
