Craig R. M. McKenzie

Craig R. M. McKenzie serves as Professor of Management and Psychology at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management, holding the Jerome Katzin Chair in Corporate Governance. His interdisciplinary work bridges business school research with psychological science, focusing on how environmental structures shape human judgment and decision processes.

McKenzie earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago (1994). His foundational research challenges conventional interpretations of cognitive biases by demonstrating how seemingly irrational choices often reflect reasonable Bayesian inferences given real-world constraints. Key contributions include reinterpreting the representativeness heuristic through environmental statistics and reframing framing effects as rational responses to contextual cues.

His publication trajectory reveals evolving emphases from basic judgment mechanisms (2006-2015) toward moral decision architecture (2016-2023), with consistent exploration of probability sensitivity, default effects, and framing phenomena. Recent work increasingly examines moral dilemmas through computational modeling while maintaining experimental rigor in behavioral testing.

Scientific recognition includes:

• National Science Foundation research awards
• Operations Research Society of America honors
• Society for Judgment and Decision Making distinctions

McKenzie's grant activity centers on NSF-funded investigations of decision architecture, with collaborative projects spanning moral psychology, risk communication, and choice engineering. His theoretical frameworks directly inform behavioral interventions in healthcare, finance, and public policy domains through the Rady School's applied research initiatives.

As a core faculty member in UC San Diego's Decision Science hub, he contributes to cross-departmental research networks examining cognitive foundations of economic behavior within the university's neuroscience and social science ecosystems.