Julie S. Downs, PhD

Biography

Julie S. Downs, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Risk Perception and Communication in the department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Downs received her Ph.D. in social psychology from Princeton University, and her B.A. in psychology from University of California, Berkeley. She has given invited addresses to a number of distinguished audiences, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the United Kingdom's Health and Safety Executive, and numerous academic audiences. Her research has been published in psychological, public policy and medical journals.

Dr. Downs studies how social influences affect decision-making, and how people can make better decisions by understanding the nature of these influences. Many people expect to contend with direct forms of influence, such as peer pressure, but far more ubiquitous and powerful are indirect influences. These include normative group influences (doing what is expected of you according to your group status or group norms), expectancy effects (behaving in accordance with what you expect, such as with alcohol use), and lack of awareness of decision opportunities.

One goal of this type of research is to implement interventions aimed at helping people make better decisions in the face of often unseen social influences. In previous research on sexual decision-making among adolescent girls, Dr. Downs and colleagues developed an interactive video DVD intervention to improve decisions in potentially risky sexual contexts. In a randomized clinical longitudinal trial, they found beneficial behavioral and biological outcomes of the intervention compared to stringent controls. Other research topics include childhood vaccination, cancer prevention, screening and treatment decisions, violence in schools, decisions associated with diabetes, susceptibility to e-mail scams, and the role of stigma in decisions.