Papers by theme

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Most of my work falls under two themes. The first involves how to elicit and aggregate beliefs, preferences, and other mental constructs. The aim is to help determine the wisdom and preferences of the crowd. The second involves how the concepts in people's heads can be deliberately revised and new concepts introduced. For example, for many people the concept of meat has been changing to include plant-based meats.

The two themes overlap: some papers are aimed at eliciting particular concepts that people hold. Papers on other aspects of individual decision making and on graph theory are listed separately.

Elicitation and aggregation

Aggregating beliefs: crowd wisdom and forecasting

Prelec, D., Seung, H.S., and McCoy, J. "A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem", Nature, 2017.

By asking people for both their own answer and a prediction of how others will answer we can recover the truth even when the majority is wrong.

Representative press: Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg (2017), Bloomberg (2018), Quartz, MIT News, Scientific American, NPR, Aeon, Ars Technica, Pacific Standard
Mellers, B., Lu, L., and McCoy, J. "Predicting the future with humans and AI", Consumer Psychology Review, 2023.

A review of forecasting for a consumer behavior audience, including the human-versus-algorithm prediction debate, why people resist algorithms, how human forecasting can be improved, and the psychological advantages of hybrid systems.
McCoy, J. and Prelec, D. "A Bayesian hierarchical model of crowd wisdom based on predicting opinions of others", Management Science, 2024.

A statistical model for crowd wisdom that infers individual expertise.
Mellers, B., McCoy, J., Lu, L., and Tetlock, P. "Human and Algorithmic Predictions in Geopolitical Forecasting: Quantifying Uncertainty in Hard-to-Quantify Domains", Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2024.

A discussion of human and algorithmic prediction in a geopolitical forecasting context.
McCoy, J. and Prelec, D. "Belief Decomposition: A Mechanism for Collective Inference", 2026. Working paper.

A mechanism to decompose beliefs into private and common information. This helps both to aggregate beliefs (since common information is not overweighted) and to elicit beliefs (since the mechanism provides incentives for honesty and effort).

Eliciting and aggregating preferences

McCoy, J., Ciulli, R., and Bradlow, E. "Two-For-One Conjoint: Bayesian Cross-Category Learning for Shared-Attribute Categories", 2022. Working paper.

An approach to learn preferences about one product category by using information from a related product category. For example, ice cream preferences provide information about frozen yogurt preferences.
Sterckx, J.-L., McCoy, J., and De Langhe, B. "Judgments of Relative Value: What Would You Offer, and What Would You Demand?", 2026. Working paper.

To elicit preferences between two goods, respondents can be asked how much they would demand for a fixed quantity of one good, or how much they would offer for a fixed quantity of the other. We show that these two elicitations lead to systematically different responses.

Eliciting beliefs

Yin, S., Arkes, H.R., McCoy, J., Cohen, M.E., and Mellers, B.A. "Conflicting Goals Influence Physicians' Expressed Beliefs to Patients and Colleagues", Medical Decision Making, 2021.

An examination of how physicians' expressed beliefs to patients and colleagues can be influenced by their goals.

Eliciting mental images

Bigelow, E., McCoy, J.*, and Ullman, T.* "Non-Commitment in Mental Imagery", Cognition, 2023.

Imagine a person knocking a ball off a table. What color was the ball? Mental images often leave basic properties unspecified and people's descriptions of their mental imagery depends on how it is elicited.

Press: Scientific American, Discover Magazine

Eliciting concepts

McCoy, J.* and Ullman, T.* "A Minimal Turing Test", Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018.

What one word would you give to convince a judge that you are human and not an AI system? The words people choose reveal their stereotypes of humans and AI, illustrating a general method for eliciting stereotypes.

Representative press: Science, BBC Future, The Verge, Cnet, Psychology Today, New Statesman
McCoy, J.* and Ullman, T.* "Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics", PLOS ONE, 2019.

People's intuitive physics concepts are elicited by asking how much effort various magical spells would take to cast.

A delightful piece that mentions this work: New Yorker

Concept engineering

Concept engineering and consumer categories

McCoy, J. "Putnam Products: Is Non-alcoholic Beer Beer or Oat Milk Milk?", 2025. Working paper.

Products such as non-alcoholic beer, lab-grown meat, and oat milk lack what was traditionally thought to be a core property of the category for which they are named. An examination of how consumers categorize such products, and how this can be changed.
McCoy, J. "The Marketer as Concept Engineer", 2026. Working paper.

An argument that an important role for marketers is as concept engineers, a framework for doing concept engineering, and a perspective on future research directions.
McCoy, J. "Oat Milk, Plant-Based Burgers, and Cauliflower Rice: Evaluating Label-Induced Consumer Category Confusion", 2026. Working paper.

Empirical research to help address ongoing policy and legal debates about whether labels like "almond milk" confuse consumers more than alternatives like "almond drink".

What makes a concept stick

Aka, A., Bhatia, S., and McCoy, J. "Semantic determinants of memorability", Cognition, 2023.

A machine learning model built on word meanings predicts which words people will remember, and does so more accurately than people.
Aka, A.* and McCoy, J.* "Predicting the Memorability of Brand Slogans", Journal of Marketing Research, 2026.

Models that predict how well a slogan will be remembered and how well it cues its brand. The models help examine the completeness of the literature on text memorability and can be used to help select candidate brand slogans.

Individual decision making

Liu, S., McCoy, J., & Ullman, T. "People's perception of others' risk preferences", Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2019.

The predictions that people make about the risk preferences of others, relative to their own.
McCoy, J.*, Paul, L.A.*, and Ullman, T.* "Modal Prospection", chapter in Metaphysics and Cognitive Science, 2019.

An examination of how people evaluate possibilities about their own lives. The empirical studies involve responses to far-fetched scenarios.
McCoy, J. and Ullman, T. "Transformative Decisions and Their Discontents", Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 2019.

A commentary on L.A. Paul's Transformative Experience from the perspective of the psychology of judgment and decision making.