Dr. Joshua Becker

Biography

Joshua Becker received his PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems in the Kellogg School of Management. Before his graduate studies, Joshua worked professionally in mediation and communication training, where he conducted hundreds of mediation sessions involving personal disputes and employer-employee conflicts, in addition to facilitating decision-making processes. He currently serves as a volunteer neighborhood mediator in London. His research agenda concentrates on 'collective intelligence,' specifically how group organizational design influences task performance, innovation, decision making, and forecasting. Recent work highlights the accuracy of numeric estimates provided by groups, referred to as 'the wisdom of crowds,' focusing on tasks such as hiring decisions, market analyses, and product design. His research has been published in prestigious journals including Science, Management Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Harvard Business Review. Joshua's findings suggest that while groups exhibit unique properties that cannot be predicted by individual behavior alone, they often yield counterintuitive results, such as his discovery of the 'crowd classification problem,' where group deliberation enhances numeric estimate accuracy but compromises overall decision accuracy.

Research Interests

Experience