Elke Weber awarded the Howard Crosby Warren Medal for outstanding contributions to experimental psychology
Elke Weber, an expert on environmental decision-making, has received the 2025 Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
Weber, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Energy and the Environment and professor of psychology and public affairs, was recognized by the society “for her careful and creative empirical research that has led to insightful and impactful theories of how people make decisions,” according to the citation.
The Howard Crosby Warren Medal, first established in 1936, is one of the most prestigious awards in North American psychology. The medal is named after Howard Crosby Warren, the first chair of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology. It is awarded annually to a researcher in the United States or Canada who has made outstanding achievements in experimental psychology over the past five years.
Weber studies how people interpret risk and make decisions under uncertainty. Motivated to understand why people do not always make wholly rational choices — choices grounded in evidence, data, and logic alone — her work has shown that people often consult their emotions or other factors like social norms to decide on a course of action.
The citation noted that Weber has applied her multi-disciplinary approach to “address a wide range of important societal problems, including climate change, environmental sustainability, energy policy, and financial and economic decisions.”
Insights from Weber’s work have informed guidelines and best practices about how to effectively communicate the risks of climate change, create energy and environmental policy incorporating the different ways in which people perceive and respond to risk, and motivate individuals to make environmentally friendly choices. She was the first expert from the field of psychology invited to serve as a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and introduced a broader range of social goals and decision processes in two chapters of the Climate Change Mitigation working group for the IPCC’s 5th and 6th Assessment Reports.
Weber joined the Princeton faculty in 2016, where she founded and leads the Behavioral Science for Policy Lab. For eight years, she was the associate director for education at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. She is also a faculty member of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment based in the School of Public and International Affairs, where she directs the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) certificate. She earned a Ph.D. and M.A. in cognitive psychology and behavior and decision analysis from Harvard University and a B.A. degree in psychology from York University in Toronto, Canada.
Weber will receive the medal in April at the 2025 meeting of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in St. Louis. The society was founded in 1904 with a mission to advance psychology by arranging informal conferences on experimental psychology. It has a current membership of 281 individuals, admitting at least six new members annually from among the leading experimental psychologists in North America.