Reid Hastie has degrees from Stanford University, the University of California at San Diego, and Yale University in Psychology. He has taught at Harvard University, Northwestern University, the University of Colorado (where he was Director of the Center for Research on Judgment and Policy), and is now a Professor of Behavioral Science on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business in the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago. He has served on review panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Research Council; and on sixteen professional journal editorial boards. His research has been funded continuously by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health since 1975.
His primary research interests are in the areas of judgment and decision making (managerial, legal, medical, engineering, and personal), memory and cognition, and social psychology. He has published over 100 articles in scientific journals on these topics. Currently, he is studying the psychology of investment decisions; the role of explanations in category concept representations (including the effects on category classification, deductive, and inductive inferences); civil jury decision making (punitive damages and sexual harassment); the primitive sources of confidence and probability judgments; decision making competencies across the adult life span; and neural substrates of risky decisions.