Elke U. Weber

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Elke U. Weber
Born	6 April 1957
Alma mater	Harvard University York University
Awards	Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2018)
Academic career
Institutions	Columbia University (–2016) Princeton University (2016–)

Elke U. Weber (born April 6, 1957) is a Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University where she holds the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professorship in Energy & the Environment.^[1] Prior to moving to Princeton in 2016, she spent 19 years at Columbia University, where she founded and co-directed the Earth Institute's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions ^[2] and the Columbia Business School's Center for Decision Sciences.^[3]

Weber received a B.A. in Psychology from York University in 1980 and a PhD. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1984. She began her professional career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. From 1988 to 1995, she was Assistant and then Associate Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. In 1995, she joined Ohio State University as Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Management and Human Resources. In 1999, Weber joined Columbia University as a Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology, where she was a Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business until 2016.^[4] In 2016, she joined the faculty at Princeton as a Professor of Psychology and Public Policy.^[1] In 2020, Weber was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.^[5] In 2024, Weber received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Social Sciences.^[6]

She has done research related to Query Theory and the role that memory processes play in preference construction.

More recently, she is known for her contributions to research on choice architecture and how to apply decision research to public policy.^[7]

Weber has served as President of the Society for Neuroeconomics, the Society for Mathematical Psychology,^[8] and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. ^[9]

Elke U. Weber's research spans several major areas in psychology, behavioral economics, and environmental decision-making. Her work has helped define how individuals and societies perceive risk, form preferences, and make complex decisions—especially in domains involving uncertainty, sustainability, and cultural context. Her contributions have garnered numerous honors, including the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, election to both the U.S. and German National Academies of Sciences,^[10] and the Patrick Suppes Prize in Psychology.^[11]

Weber is widely recognized for her foundational work on how people perceive and take risks. Early in her career, she challenged the assumption that risk preference is a stable personality trait,^[12] showing instead that it is sensitive to context, domain, and culture. Her co-development of the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale^[13] has become a standard in the field, allowing researchers to measure risk attitudes across different areas such as health, finance, and social behavior. Her work reveals that perceived risk, rather than objective probabilities, often drives decisions, and that affective responses play a critical role in shaping risk behavior. This has implications for public policy, from health communication to environmental regulation.

Along with longtime collaborator Eric Johnson, Weber developed Query Theory, a framework that treats preferences not as pre-existing, but as constructed in real time. According to this theory, people generate internal queries—mental questions that search memory for justifications—to arrive at decisions.

The order in which these queries are posed can significantly influence choice, helping to explain phenomena like the endowment effect and time discounting. Query Theory provided a formal and testable model for the long-standing idea that preferences are labile and context-dependent. It has been used to inform interventions ranging from consumer choice architecture to financial planning tools.

Weber has explored how culture and social norms shape the ways people interpret and respond to information. Her cross-cultural research showed that while risk perceptions vary widely across societies, the influence of social norms on behavior is a universal feature of human psychology.

Her work integrates psychological theory with anthropological insights to understand how norms emerge, persist, and shift—especially in the context of collective action. She has been a leader in bringing behavioral science into dialogue with systems thinking and network models to examine how cultural values affect sustainability, cooperation, and governance.

A major theme in Weber’s recent work is how individuals understand and respond to the global threat of climate change. She has shown that the psychological distance of climate impacts—abstract, future-oriented, and probabilistic—makes them easy to ignore.

Her research suggests that emotional engagement, hope, and social norms are critical levers for motivating action.

Weber served as a lead author for both the Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).^[14] Her contributions have emphasized the role of behavioral science in climate mitigation, and she has worked to integrate insights from psychology into policy frameworks.

Weber has received numerous awards and honors for her work.

• 2009: Weber received an honorary degree in psychology from the University of Basel.^[15]
• 2012 Honorary professorship in economic science from Technical University Munich.^[16]

• 2023 Patrick Suppes Prize in Psychology.^[17]

• 2024: Newman-Proshansky Career Achievement Award, APA Division 34

• 2024: Honorary doctorate in sustainability from Leuphana University.^[18]
• 2024: Weber was named 100 Best Heads in Science in Berlin.^[19]
• 2024 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Social Sciences.^[6]
• 2024 Newman-Proshansky Career Achievement Award, American Psychological Association (APA), Division 34 (Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology).

• 2025 She received the Howard Crosby Warren Medal, Society for Experimental Psychology, for the most significant advances in Experimental Psychology over the prior five years. ^[20]

• Own website with Curriculum Vitae