Trent Cash

Trent Cash is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University working towards a joint degree in Behavioral Decision Research and Psychology. His research interests lie at the intersection of Education, Psychology, and Public Policy, with a particular interest in the applications of Decision Psychology in the domain of Education. Specifically, Trent is interested in answering questions regarding the ways in which basic cognitive processes, such as biases and heuristics, affect the educational decisions individuals make, and how these processes interact with the social infrastructure designed to aid them in making such complex and meaningful decisions. Within this framework, he is particularly interested in evaluating the cognitive and social factors that affect educational decisions within the contexts of K-12 school choice, gifted education, educational public policy, and adolescent post-secondary program selection. Currently, Trent is conducting a Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis to compare the attributes that parents prioritize when picking schools to the weighting formulas that online resources such as Zillow and U.S. News & World Report use in order to evaluate and rank schools across the world.