Assistant Professor
Department of Bioethics and Decision Sciences
100 N. Academy Ave.
Danville, PA 17822
570-214-0507
Nick Byrd, PhD
Research interests
Dr. Byrd collaborates with students and scientists around the world to trace and improve thinking in education, ethics, healthcare, public health, intelligence analysis, and more. Support from public agencies like the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, philanthropic organizations like the John Templeton Foundation, and companies like Phonic have allowed Nick and his teams to develop interventions to overcome cognitive biases, develop new apps to scale up think-aloud and interactive experiments, and refine recruitment methods to study tens of thousands of people around the world. The teams’ peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Cognition, Journal of Intelligence, and Synthese and have already reached the top 5% in terms of online attention from venues like Nature, NPR, and Forbes. Byrd has also written about topics such as artificial intelligence, decision-making, and ethics for outlets like Psychology Today and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Education
- Intel. Community Postdoc., Carnegie Mellon University & Stevens Institute of Technology
- Ph.D., Philosophy (Psychology concentration), Florida State University
- M.A., Philosophy (Cognitive Science graduate certificate), University of Colorado Boulder
- B.A., Philosophy (Biblical Studies minor), Palm Beach Atlantic University
Recent Publications
- Byrd, N., Joseph, B., Gongora, G., & Sirota, M. (2023). Tell Us What You Really Think: A Think Aloud Protocol Analysis of the Verbal Cognitive Reflection Test. Journal of Intelligence, 11(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11040076
- Byrd, N., & Thompson, M. (2022). Testing for Implicit Bias: Values, Psychometrics, and Science Communication. WIREs Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1612
- Byrd, N., & Białek, M. (2021). Your Health vs. My Liberty: Philosophical beliefs dominated reflection and identifiable victim effects when predicting public health recommendation compliance. Cognition, 212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104649
- Byrd, N. (2020). Causal Network Accounts of Ill-Being: Depression & Digital Well-Being. In C. Burr & L. Floridi (Eds.), Ethics of Digital Well-Being: A Multidisciplinary Approach (pp. 221–245). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50585-1_11
- Byrd, N., & Conway, P. (2019). Not all who ponder count costs: Arithmetic reflection predicts utilitarian tendencies, but logical reflection predicts both deontological and utilitarian tendencies. Cognition, 192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.06.007