In a new research project, Dr. Will Senn, Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems in the Dr. Sam Pack College of Business, examines how structured information environments support human decision-making.
Dr. Senn’s post-tenure research, in which he serves as Principal Investigator, is supported by a grant that investigates how individuals apprehend—or come to learn—through encounters with information systems. At the center of Dr. Senn’s work is the concept of proximity: the alignment between the information a system presents and what a person’s existing knowledge allows them to process and understand.
The Participatory Supreme Court Game (PSCG) study tests whether displaying extracted legal factors helps participants make more accurate and consistent decisions in Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure cases. Instead of presenting cases as undifferentiated text, the software highlights the reasoning elements that experienced legal professionals use, creating proximity between the participant and the structure of legal judgment.
The Participatory Democracy Budgeting Game (PDBG) is a companion study that applies the same principle to civic decision-making. It examines how participants build consensus on federal budget priorities when given structured access to the parameters that shape fiscal tradeoffs.
Both projects involve community participants recruited through local charitable organizations and will contribute anonymized data to national research repositories. The two-year project supports undergraduate research assistants and connects applied human-subjects research to foundational questions in information science and epistemology.