Dr David Gamblin

Overview

Biography

David is a Lecturer in the Department of Organizational Psychology and the Programme Director for the MSc in Management Consultancy and Organizational Change. He teaches Applied Decision Making, Decision Making Perspectives, and Workplace Health and Wellbeing.

Prior to joining Birkbeck, David had research and teaching experience at UCL, University of Surrey, and the Academy of Contemporary Music, covering decision making, cognitive psychology, critical thinking, and consumer psychology. His research aims to take learnings from judgement and decision making (JDM) and apply it to occupational and organizational contexts, and has worked on applied projects in policing, military, and the performing arts.

In addition to teaching and research, David has worked as an auditor in financial services, as a selection and assessment analyst, and run his own consultancy practice.

Administrative responsibilities

• Mitigating Circumstances Committee
• School Education Committee
• Departmental Education Committee

Research

Research interests

• Judgement and Decision Making
• Heuristics and Biases
• Metacognition
• Behavioural Economics
• Social Cognition

Research overview

In my research, I aim to examine how people make decisions, provide judgements, and solve problems. I am interested in this area, as a better understanding of people’s thought processes – including the heuristics they use, and the biases and errors they succumb to – can help to identify modifications to improve decision making, such as redesigning the environment, or through training. Therefore, whilst I am grounded in cognitive and JDM disciplines, my objective is to apply this to occupational and organizational contexts. This has included military decision making under stress, training provision in a policing context, and legal design.

I have a particular interest in metacognitive cues which guide judgement and decision making, and have focussed my research on processing fluency – the subjective ease of processing information. Processing fluency is a flexible cue that has been shown to influence a wide range of judgements including value, trust, liking, and familiarity, and therefore has applications in art appreciation, advertising, and personnel selection. In examining this cue, I have used behavioural experimentation, facial electromyography, and Meta-Analysis.

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Applied Decision Making

Leadership, Management and Strategy: A Decision Making Perspective

Workplace Health and Wellbeing

Teaching modules

• The Consultancy Challenge (BUOB063D7)
• Applied Decision Making (BUOB079H7)

Publications