Matthew Welsh

Research Interests

Decision Making Experimental Psychology Psychology and Cognitive Sciences

Matthew Welsh

Education Transformation

Division of Academic and Student Engagement

I am a psychological scientist specialising in decision making . In my role at the Australian School of Petroleum and Energy Resources, I research how people's decision-making tendencies impact the choices they make and the economic flow-on effects of this for industries like oil and gas, which depend on expert judgement and estimation to reduce uncertainty.As part of this research, I work with oil companies, helping them to identify psychological biases in personnel and processes and developing training regimes and decision support tools to limit or eliminate those biases.I have supervised students in both ASPER and the School of Psychology at the Honours and PhD level, and have taught undergraduate and Masters level courses in both schools as well.

My key areas of interest are: 1) decision making; 2) biases; 3) individual differences; 4) human factors; and 5) the interaction of these in the elicitation of expert opinion.

My primary focus is on decision making in real world problems such as those faced in the petroleum industry. For example, examining the impact of cognitive biases on petroleum decisions and mechanisms for reducing these - whether through selection and training of personnel or the redesign of processes to better align with people's decision making capabilities. Specifically, considering how we should ask questions to translate beliefs into usable, numerical formats while avoiding biases known to affect judgements made under uncertainty.

From this research, I have written a book: Bias in Science and Communication: A Field Guide (IoP Press, 2018) and more than 50 papers in psychology and industry outlets and, in 2020-21, was named a Society of Petroleum Engineers Distinguished Lecturer, speaking on how an understanding of cognitive psychology can help to improve industry decisions.

I have reviewed papers for Psychological Science, Cognitive Science, the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, AAPG Bulletin, SPE Economics and Management, the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Management Research Review and the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.

Date Position Institution name
2013 - ongoing Senior Research Fellow University of Adelaide
2007 - 2012 Research Fellow University of Adelaide
2004 - 2006 Postdoctoral Research Fellow Unibversity of Adelaide

Date Institution name Country Title
2011 - 2012 University of Adelaide Australia Grad. Cert. Ed. (Higher)
1999 - 2002 University of Adelaide Australia PhD
1995 - 1998 University of Adelaide Australia BSc(Hons)
1989 - 1993 University of Adelaide Australia BA(Hons)

Year Citation
2020 Newman, D., Begg, S., & Welsh, M. (2020). Can 1 h of training lead to better project decision-making?. EURO Journal on Decision Processes, 8(1-2), 89-124.
DOI Scopus1 WoS1
2018 Newman, D., Begg, S., & Welsh, M. B. (2018). Why are decisions for oil and gas projects not always made the way they 'should' be?. APPEA Journal, 58(1), 130-158.
DOI
2018 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2018). More-or-less elicitation (MOLE): reducing bias in range estimation and forecasting. Euro Journal on Decision Processes, 6(1-2), 171-212.
DOI Scopus6 WoS4
2016 Newman, D., Begg, S., & Welsh, M. (2016). Front end loading: misunderstood or misapplied?. Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) Journal, 56(1), 247-258.
2016 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2016). What have we learnt? Insights from a decade of bias research.. Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) Journal, 56(1), 435-450.
2014 Welsh, M., Delfabbro, P., Burns, N., & Begg, S. (2014). Individual differences in anchoring: traits and experience. Learning and Individual Differences, 29, 131-140.
DOI Scopus22 WoS16
2012 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2012). Personal ruin versus corporate profit: Why individual risk attitudes lessen economic outcomes. APPEA Journal, 2012, 1-10.
2012 Welsh, M., & Navarro, D. (2012). Seeing is believing: priors, trust, and base rate neglect. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 119(1), 1-14.
DOI Scopus43 WoS38
2011 Welsh, M., Al Hakim, A., Ball, F., Dunstan, J., & Begg, S. (2011). Do personality traits affect decision-making ability: can MBTI type predict biases?. APPEA Journal, 51(1), 359-368.
2010 Welsh, M., Rees, N., Ringwood, H., & Begg, S. (2010). The planning fallacy in oil and gas decision-making. APPEA Journal, 2010, 1-12.
2008 Mackie, S., Begg, S., Smith, C., & Welsh, M. (2008). "Real World" decision-making in the upstream oil and gas industry - prescriptions for improvement. APPEA Journal, 2008, 329-344.
2007 Elliott, T., Welsh, M., Nettelbeck, T., & Mills, V. (2007). Investigating naturalistic decision making in a simulated microworld: What questions should we ask?. Behavior Research Methods (Print Edition), 39(4), 901-910.
DOI Scopus10 WoS8 Europe PMC1
2007 Mackie, S., Begg, S., Smith, C., & Welsh, M. (2007). Decision type - a key to realising the potential of decision making under uncertainty. APPEA Journal, 22(1), 307-317.
2006 Chapman, T., Nettelbeck, T., Welsh, M., & Mills, V. (2006). Investigating the construct validity associated with microworld research: A comparison of performance under different management structures across expert and non-expert naturalistic decision-making groups. Australian Journal of Psychology, 58(1), 40-47.
DOI Scopus7 WoS7

Year Citation
2022 Welsh, M. (2022). What is the CRT? Intelligence, Personality, Decision Style or Attention?. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati, & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI 2022) Vol. 44 (pp. 607-614). Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus3
2021 Welsh, M. (2021). Does anything predict anchoring bias?. In P. Laughlin (Ed.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) Vol. 43 (pp. 3089-3095). Austin, Texas, United States: Cognitive Science Society.
2020 Welsh, M. (2020). May I have your attention? Testing a subjective attention scale. In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) Vol. 42 (pp. 2535-2541). Austin, Texas, United States: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus2
2020 Welsh, M. (2020). Overconfident in hindsight: memory, hindsight bias and overconfidence. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) Vol. 42 (pp. 822-828). Austin, Texas, United States: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus1
2020 Newman, D., Begg, S., & Welsh, M. (2020). Simplified front end loading: A route to better project outcomes. In Proceedings of the SPE Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition (APOGCE, 2020). online: OnePetro.
DOI Scopus4
2019 Babadimas, C., Boras, C., Rendoulis, N., Welsh, M. B., & Begg, S. (2019). Transferability of calibration training between knowledge domains. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI, 2019) Vol. 41 (pp. 1362-1367). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.
2019 Liaw, A., Welsh, M. B., Copp, H., & Breyer, B. (2019). Individual differences, expertise, and outcome bias in medical decision making. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (COGSCI, 2019) Vol. 41 (pp. 2140-2145). Montreal, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus4
2018 Newman, D., Begg, S., & Welsh, M. (2018). Improving outcomes for oil and gas projects through better use of Front End Loading and decision analysis. In Proceedings of the SPE Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition (APOGCE 2018) (pp. 1-21). Brisbane, Australia: OnePetro.
DOI Scopus4
2018 Clausen, M., & Welsh, M. B. (2018). Multiple anchors and the MOLE: Bbenefits for elicitation. In T. T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu, & C. W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings: COGSCI 2018: changing / minds Vol. 40 (pp. 1506-1511). Austin, USA: Cognitive Science Society.
2017 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2017). The Cognitive Reflection Test: familiarity and predictive power in professionals. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), CogSci 2017: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition (pp. 3497-3502). London, UK: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus3
2017 Hilbig, T., Welsh, M., & Delfabbro, P. (2017). Perceptions of psychological momentum in basketball. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), CogSci 2017: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition (pp. 2211-2216). London, UK: Cognitive Science Society.
2016 Kaesler, M., Welsh, M., & Semmler, C. (2016). Predicting overprecision in range estimation. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. Trueswell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society Vol. B (pp. 502-507). Online: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus4
2016 Welsh, M., Steacy, S., Begg, S., & Navarro, D. (2016). A tale of two disasters: biases in risk communication. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. Trueswell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting (pp. 544-549). Online: CSS.
2015 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2015). Reducing overconfidence in forecasting with repeated judgement elicitation. In D. In Noelle, R. Dale, A. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. Jennings, & P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2637-2642). Austin, Texas: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus1
2014 Begg, S. H., Bratvold, R. B., & Welsh, M. B. (2014). Uncertainty vs. variability: what's the difference and why is it important?. In Proceedings of SPE Hydrocarbon Economics and Evaluation Symposium (pp. 273-293). Houston, Texas: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus42
2013 Welsh, M., Burns, N., & Delfabbro, P. (2013). The cognitive reflection test: how much more than numerical ability?. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1587-1592). Germany: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus53
2012 Welsh, M. (2012). Expertise and the wisdom of crowds: Whose judgments to trust and when. In Proceedings of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, COGSCI 2012 (pp. 1131-1136). online: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus1
2012 Welsh, M. (2012). Intensive teaching modes: benefits, drawbacks and directions forward. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education, AAEE 2012 (pp. 1-7). Melbourne: ESER Group.
2011 Sykes, M., Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2011). Don't drop the anchor: Recognizing and mitigating human factors when making assessment judgments under uncertainty. In Proceedings of the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition 2011 Vol. 2 (pp. 1256-1270). USA: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
Scopus6
2011 Bruza, B., Welsh, M., Navarro, D., & Begg, S. (2011). Does anchoring cause overconfidence only in experts?. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2011 (pp. 1947-1952). online: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus5
2011 Welsh, M., Navarro, D., & Begg, S. (2011). Number preference, precision and implicity confidence. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2011 (pp. 1521-1526). online: Cognitive Science Society.
Scopus16
2011 Welsh, M., Delfabbro, P., Burns, N., & Begg, S. (2011). Individual differences in anchoring: Numerical ability, education and experience. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2011 (pp. 3193-3198). online: Cognitive Science Society.
2010 Bruza, B., Welsh, M., Navarro, D., & Begg, S. (2010). In what sense is P(A/B) P(B) = P(A,B)? The relationship between distributional format and subjective probability estimates. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1792-1797). www: Cognitive Science Society.
2010 Welsh, M. (2010). Of parrots and parsimony: reconsidering morgan's canon. In Proceedings of 32rd Annual meeting of the cognitive science society (pp. 1798-1803). www: Cognitive Science Society.
2010 Welsh, M. B., & Begg, S. H. (2010). Don't let it weigh you down: how to benefit from anchoring. In SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, 19-22 September 2010, Florence, Italy Vol. 7 (pp. 5239-5246). Florence, Italy: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus6
2010 Mackie, S. I., Begg, S. H., Smith, C., & Welsh, M. B. (2010). Human decision-making in the oil and gas industry. In SPE Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition 2010, APOGCE 2010 Vol. 1 (pp. 117-124). Brisbane, Queensland: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus7
2009 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2009). Repeated judgment elicitation: tapping the wisdom of crowds in individuals. In Proceedings of the 2009 SPE Annual Technical Conference Vol. 7 (pp. 1-10). USA: SPE International.
DOI
2009 Welsh, M., Lee, M., & Begg, S. (2009). Repeated judgements in elicitation tasks: Efficacy of the MOLE method. In Proceedings of COGSI 2009 Vol. 2009 (pp. 1529-1534). Netherlands: Cognitive Science Society.
2008 Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2008). Modeling the economic impact of individual and corporate risk attitude. In Proceedings of ATCE 2008 Vol. 6 (pp. 1-10). CD: SPE.
DOI Scopus8
2008 Heywood-Smith, A., Welsh, M., & Begg, S. (2008). Cognitive Errors in Estimation: Does Anchoring Cause Overconfidence?. In Proceedings of ATCE 2008 Vol. 6 (pp. 1-10). CD: SPE.
DOI Scopus9
2008 Bruza, B., Welsh, M., & Navarro, D. (2008). Does memory mediate susceptibility to cognitive biases? Implications of the decision-by-sampling theory. In Proceedings of CogSci 2008 - 30th Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1-6). USA: Cognitive Science Society.
2008 Welsh, M., Lee, M., & Begg, S. (2008). More-or-less elicitation (MOLE): Testing a heuristic elicitation method. In Proceedings from CogSci 2008 - 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Socieity (pp. 1-6). USA: Cognitive Science Society.
2008 Welsh, M., Begg, S., & Bratvold, R. (2008). Modeling the economic effect of cognitive biases on oil and gas decisions. In Journal of Petroleum Technology Vol. 60 (pp. 59-61). Anaheim: Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE).
DOI
2007 Welsh, M., & Navarro, D. (2007). Seeing is believing: Priors trust and base rate neglect. In D. McNamara, & J. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Cognitive Science Society (pp. 701-706). USA: Cognitive Science Society.
2007 Welsh, M., Begg, S., & Bratvold, R. (2007). Efficacy of bias awareness in debiasing oil and gas judgments. In D. McNamara, & J. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1647-1652). USA: Cognitive Science Society.
2007 Welsh, M., Begg, S., & Bratvold, R. (2007). Modeling the Economic Impact of Cognitive Biases on Oil and Gas Decisions. In Proceedings of the 83rd Annual Conference and Technical Exhibition of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. 11¿14 November, 2007: SPE 110765. Vol. 6 (pp. 3688-3694). Richardson, Texas: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus22
2006 Mackie, S., Welsh, M., & Lee, M. (2006). An oil and gas decision-making taxonomy. In Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Asia Pacific Oil and Gas Conference and Exhibition: Thriving on volatility, 11¿13 September, 2006. SPE paper 100699: Vol. 1 (pp. 66-74). Adelaide, Australia: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus9
2006 Welsh, M., Begg, S., & Bratvold, R. (2006). Correcting common errors in probabilistic evaluations: efficacy of debiasing. In http://www.spe.org/atce/2006/technical/wednesday_am.html, (SPE 102188) Vol. 2 (pp. 1262-1268). San Antonio, Texas, USA: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus12
2006 Mackie, S., Begg, S., Smith, C., & Welsh, M. (2006). Realizing the potential of decision-making under uncertainty. In Proceedings of 2006 AAPG International Conference and Exhibition. Perth, Western Australia: AAPG/Datapages.
2005 Lee, M., Gregory, T., & Welsh, M. (2005). Decision-Making on the Full Information Secretary Problem. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society / K. Forbus, D. Gentner, T. Reiger (eds.), (pp. 819-824). New Jersey, USA: Lawrence Erlbaum.
WoS10
2005 Lee, M., Pincombe, B., & Welsh, M. (2005). An empirical evaluation of models of text document similarity. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the XXVII Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. CD ROM 1-CD ROM 6). CD ROM: Cognitive Science Society.
2005 Welsh, M., Bratvold, R., & Begg, S. (2005). Cognitive biases in the petroleum industry: Impact and remediation. In Proceedings - SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, 9-12 October, 2005, SPE 96423. (pp. 2839-2848). Texas: Society of Petroleum Engineers.
DOI Scopus26
2004 Welsh, M., Begg, S., Bratvold, R., & Lee, M. (2004). Problems with the elicitation of uncertainty. In Proceedings of the Society of Petroleum Engineers 80th Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition 26¿29 September, 2004. SPE 90338 (pp. 2277-2287). Houston, Texas, USA: SPE.
DOI Scopus18
2002 Welsh, M. B. (2002). Forced-choice versus food-reinforced learning by mice in the T-Maze. In AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY Vol. 54 (pp. 64). AUSTRALIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL SOC.

Year Citation
2018 Clausen, M., & Welsh, M. (2018). Multiple anchors and the MOLE: Benefits for Elicitation. Poster session presented at the meeting of Poster session presented at The University of Adelaide Undergraduate Research Conference.
  • Begg, S.H. & Welsh, M.B. - ARC Linkage Project LP160101460 with Santos and Woodside. $761,000. (2017-2020)
  • Welsh, M.B. & Begg, S.H. – Santos & Woodside. “Centre for Improved Business Performance Phase V “. $150,000
  • Steacy, S., Begg, S.H. & Welsh, M.B. – University of Adelaide Interdisciplinary Research Fund “Psychology of risk perception”. $22,000 (2015).
  • Begg, S.H & Welsh, M.B. – BG Group, ExxonMobil, Santos Ltd & Woodside. “Centre for Improved Business Performance Phase IV”. $300,000 p.a. (2013-2015).
  • Welsh, M.B. – ExxonMobil Consultancy “Biases in group decision making.” $3200 (2010).
  • Begg, S.H & Welsh, M.B. – ExxonMobil & Santos Ltd. “Centre for Improved Business Performance Phase III”. US$112,000 p.a. (2010-2012).
  • Begg, S.H. & Welsh, M.B. - ExxonMobil & Santos Ltd. “Centre for Improved Business Performance Phase II”. US$100,000 p.a. (2007-2009).
  • Welsh, M.B. & Begg, S.H. – Engineering, Computing & Mathematical Science Faculty Grant. “Individual differences in decision making.” $11,000 (2010).
  • Welsh, M.B. & Begg, S.H. – Engineering, Computing & Mathematical Science Faculty Grant. “Cognitive bias in the petroleum industry.” $16,000 (2008).
  • Begg, S.H. & Welsh, M.B. – ExxonMobil Consultancy. $40,000 (2007).
  • Begg, S.H., Smith, C. & Welsh, M.B. - ARC Linkage Project 0453894 “Human Decision-Making Processes and Outcomes Under Uncertainty in the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry”. $42,000 p.a. (2005-2007).
  • Welsh, M.B. - Qantas Travel Grants. Competitively awarded to Early Career Researchers to provide airfares to international conferences. $3300 p.a. (2006, 2008).
  • Welsh, M.B. - ECMS Faculty Overseas Conference Leave Grants. Competitively awarded to ECMS Faculty staff to provide funds toward travel to international conferences. $2000 p.a. (2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014).

I currently teach in the following courses:

Decision and Risk Analysis (PETROENG 4027) in the Petroluem Engineering Bachelors

Human Factors for Decision Making (ENG 3305) in the B.Eng. (Defence Systems) and B.Tech. degrees

Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
2014 - 2019 Co-Supervisor Decision Making for Oil and Gas Projects: Using Front End Loading and Decision Analysis More Effectively Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time Mr David Newman
2005 - 2007 Co-Supervisor Human Decision-Making Under Uncertainty in the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry Doctor of Philosophy Doctorate Full Time APrf Steven Mackie

Date Role Committee Institution Country
2014 - ongoing Member ECMS Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Committee University of Adelaide -

Date Role Membership Country
2020 - ongoing Member Australian Psychological Society Australia
2015 - ongoing Member American Geophysical Union United States
2009 - ongoing Member Association for Psychological Science United States
2007 - ongoing Member Cognitive Science Society United States
2004 - 2011 Member Society of Petroleum Engineers Australia

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