John G. Lynch, Jr. is the Ted Andersen Professor of Free Enterprise at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, and the Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making. Lynch studies the cognitive psychology of consumer decision making. In addition, about a quarter of Lynch’s work concerns validity issues in research methodology. The underlying theme of his work is how the biggest threat to the validity of research findings is not failure to follow textbook prescriptions about research methodology but the inevitable incompleteness of his or her understanding of the phenomenon being studied. His best-known papers in this area focus on external validity of experiments, confounding in experiments, understanding the mediators of how some cause produces an effect, and how questions early in a survey can bias answers to later questions and behaviors.
