William Ryan

I'm a PhD student in Marketing at UC Berkeley Haas. A link to my Google Scholar page is here. A link to my osf is here.

You can contact me at williamhryan [at] gmail [dot] com or wryan [at] berkeley [dot] edu.

Bio

I graduated Harvard with a BA in 2014. After graduation I worked at TGG Group, a behavioral economics consulting firm founded by Daniel Kahneman, Steve Levitt, and other academics and business leaders. While there I ran field experiments and did econometric analysis for businesses, governments, and non-profits. After leaving TGG, I completed a Post-Baccalaureate program in Psychology at UC Berkeley, working in Anne Collin's Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, before entering my PhD at Berkeley in 2019. At Berkeley I work with most of the behavioral marketing faculty on a variety of projects.


Links to osf pages for all of the papers below, which will include data, materials, and preregistrations, can be found in the text of these papers. My Working Papers section only includes projects which are either completed or in the peer review process (e.g. under review, received R & R, etc). To learn about the other projects I'm working on, send me an email!

Working Papers


People Behave as if they Anticipate Regret Conditional on Experiencing a Bad Outcome

William H. Ryan*, Stephen M. Baum* (co-first author) and Ellen R.K. Evers


Once and Again: Repeated viewing affects judgments of spontaneity and preparation

Kristin Donnelly, William H. Ryan, and Leif Nelson


There is a collector in every consumer

Ellen R.K. Evers, William H. Ryan, and Siegwart Lindenberg


No Evidence of Bias When Using Inappropriate Test for Bias: Comment on Cesario, Johnson, & Terrill 2018

William H. Ryan and Ellen R.K. Evers.

A comment on this paper. For other critiques of this paper, as well as Cesario's responses, see Cesario's website.


Publications

Poisson Regressions: A Little Fishy

Collabra: Psychology (2021)

William H. Ryan, Ellen R.K. Evers, and Don A. Moore


Graphs with Logarithmic Axes Distort Lay Judgments

Behavioral Science & Policy (2020)

William H. Ryan and Ellen R.K. Evers


Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results

Psychological Bulletin (2020)

Justin Landy, ... , William H. Ryan & other members of the Crowdsourcing Hypothesis Tests Collaboration


Illustrated Research Projects

Below are some images an AI generated when I gave it a sentence describing the key finding of one of the above projects. The description I used is below each image. If you want to try this as well, I made a post on it.

"Using Poisson regressions on count data results in a lot of false positives"

"When anticipating regret people ask themselves, 'If I get a bad outcome, how often is it my fault?'"

"When people view something multiple times they make judgments about it as though it actually happened multiple times"

"Collecting is very common, and collectors are mostly just normal people even though research on extreme collectors suggested otherwise"

"Logarithmic axis graphs make COVID-19 data look less scary"

"A bunch of researchers predicted the results of many experiments resting the same hypothesis, and were pretty good at it"