Shai Davidai

Shai Davidai is Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School. His research examines people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole. He studies the psychological forces that shape, distort, and bias people’s perceptions of the world and their influence on people’s judgments, preferences, and choices. His topics of expertise include the psychology of judgment and decision making, economic inequality and social mobility, social comparisons, and zero-sum thinking.

His work has been published in top-tier journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Sciences, and the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Shai received his PhD from Cornell University in 2015. Prior to joining Columbia Business School, Shai spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and 3 years as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research

Research

Journal articles

• The Politics of Zero-Sum Thinking: The Relationship Between Political Ideology and the Belief That Life Is a Zero-Sum Game In Science Advances (2019)
  Coauthor(s): Shai Davidai, M. Ongis

• The Second Pugilist's Plight: Why People Believe They Are above Average, but Are Not Especially Happy about It In Journal for Experimental Psychology: General (2019)
  Coauthor(s): Shai Davidai, Sebastian Deri

• Why Do Americans Believe in Economic Mobility? Economic Inequality, External Attributions of Wealth and Poverty, and the Belief in Economic Mobility In Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2018)
  Coauthor(s): Shai Davidai

• Are "Nudges" Getting a Fair Shot? Joint Versus Separate Evaluation In Behavioural Public Policy (2018)
  Coauthor(s): Shai Davidai, E. Shafir

• How Should We Think About Americans' Perceptions of Socioeconomic Mobility In Judgment and Decision Making (2018)
  Coauthor(s): Shai Davidai, T. Gilovich

Chapters

• Economic Inequality and Social Progress In International Panel on Social Progress: Rethinking Society for the 21st Century (2018)
  Coauthor(s): Shai Davidai, Stephan Klasen, Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Rebeca Grynspan, Luis Lopez-Calva, Nora Lustig

Awards And Honors

• 2017 Faculty Research Fund, The New School
  $5500

• 2017 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Small Grant Research Award
  $1500

• 2016 Spring School of Behavioral Economics, Rady School of Management, UC San Diego, Award

• 2016 Sage Graduate Research Fellowship, Cornell University
  $22,000

• 2016 Judgment and Decision Making Preconference Student Award
  $200