Inky Park

Hello, there! I am Inky (Inkyung in full Korean), a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology at University of Iowa.

I study cognitive psychology, decision science to be more specific. I conduct behavioral research that focuses on the processes underlying people’s decisions when the decision contexts involve risk or uncertainty, and how such knowledge can be adapted to enhance the quality of decision making in our everyday life.

Outside the lab, I like to cook, mostly to recreate the Korean dishes. I also am beginner in German and acoustic guitar. At some point I would like to play a song about Korean dishes in German with my guitar.

Education

Past & Current Projects

Wishful thinking is a phenomena where expectation for an outcome is inflated when you want outcome to occur (and deflated when you don’t want that outcome to occur). Simple example: you’d expect it is going to be sunny on your wedding day even when the forecast says there’s 50% chance of rain! The main goals of the Wishful Thinking Projects are to 1) provide clear empirical evidence that establishes that desire causes inflation of expectation, while controlling for potential confounding factors such as level of knowledge or agency people might have over the outcome of interest. And 2) understand what moderates this wishful thiking effect.

• Experiencing event boundaries impact the wishful predictions (Work in progress) · Online Task Link · Poster Presentation
• A diffusion model decomposition of the wishful thinking in stochastic events (Work in progress) · Online Task Link · Departmental Talk
• People express more bias in their predictions than in their likelihood judgment (Published) · Paper Link
• The desirability bias in predictions under aleatory and epistemic uncertainty (Published) · Paper Link

When making decisions involving risk, people may learn about the risk from descriptions (numbers or probabilities) or from experience. When people show different risk behavior depending on how they’ve learned the risk information, this is called the description-experience. Using a computerized game called the Decisions about Risk Task (DART), we investigated whether learning from description versus experience differentially affect how people contextualize varying levels of risk.

• Context dependency in risky decision making: Is there a description-experience gap? · Paper Link · Departmental Talk

I investigated how basic numerical cognitive abilities (numeracy and symbolic number estimation) contribute to financial risky decision making. I hypothesized that symbolic number estimation, a measure of how individuals internally represent numerical magnitude, would better capture individual differences in risky decision making, while controlling for possible covariates associated with decision making (e.g. personality traits, math anxiety and fluid intelligence) -- and it did!

• The influence of number line estimation precision and numeracy on risky financial decision making (Published)) · Paper Link