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Department of

Psychology

Linderman Library Rotunda stained glass dome
Jessecae Marsh, Associate Professor for Psychology at Lehigh University

Jessecae Marsh

Professor

Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Programs & International Initiatives

610.758.2941
jem311@lehigh.edu
Chandler-Ullmann room 105
Education:

Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, Yale University

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Additional Interests

  • Causality
  • Concepts
  • Health Reasoning

Research Statement

Jessecae Marsh is a cognitive psychologist who studies how people’s beliefs influence the way they reason and make decisions. Beliefs about the cause-and-effect relationships between events allow people to understand the world around them by providing satisfying and predictive explanations for why events occur. Likewise, beliefs about categories provide structure to the “blooming, buzzing” environment and allow people to infer what may be true of newly encountered category members. Importantly, understanding of causality and categories is intertwined: Causal beliefs dictate how people categorize and category representations are shaped by causal information. Marsh takes her interest in causality and concepts to understand how theories of cognition translate into real-world beliefs and settings. To achieve this, she collaborates with a wide and varied set of researchers from inside and outside of psychology.

Biography

Dr. Marsh received her B.S. in Psychology and Biology from Vanderbilt University. She worked as a full-time lab manager in a psychology lab before starting her Ph.D. studies in Cognitive Psychology at Yale University. Upon graduation, Marsh took a faculty position at Texas Tech University. After three years at TTU, she started a faculty position at Lehigh. She was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. She served as director of the Health, Medicine, and Society Program at Lehigh from 2017 – 2022. In 2022, she became the Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Programs and International Initiatives for the College of Arts and Sciences. 

Kleinberg, S , *Korshakova, E., & Marsh, J. K. (2023). How beliefs influence choice perceptions. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1406–1412). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2f9840bx

Kleinberg, S., & Marsh, J. K. (2023). Less is more: Information needs, information wants, and what makes causal models useful. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 8, 57. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-023-00509-7

*Korshakova, E., Marsh, J. K., & Kleinberg, S. (2023). Quantifying the utility of complexity and feedback loops in causal models for decision making. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2208–2214). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/80g1r3wz

Malt, B. C., & Marsh, J. K. (2023). What does it take to love a bug? Knowledge vs. emotional valence and politics in attitudes toward insect conservation. Topics in Cognitive Science, 15, 500-521.. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12676

Ungson, N. D., Bucher, K., Marsh, J. K., Lamadrid, A., & Packer, D. J. (2023). Won’t you be my neighbor? Local community identification predicted decreased stress over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 17, e12764. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12764

*Wilson, J., & Marsh, J. K. (2023). Perceptions of explanation completeness help decrease knowledge overestimation. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 717–723). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gv611vd

Braun, D., Ingram, D., Ingram, D., Khan, B., Marsh, J. K., & McAndrew, T. (2022). Crowdsourced perceptions and COVID-19: Improving computational forecasts of US national incident cases of COVID-19 with crowdsourced perceptions of human behavior. JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 8(12), e39336. https://doi.org/10.2196/39336

*Czarnowski, D. W., & Marsh, J. K. (2022). Transferring causal knowledge across category levels. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 122–128). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rx6r915

Kleinberg, S., *Alay, E., & Marsh, J. K. (2022). Absence makes the trust in causal models grow stronger. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2037–2043). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2d48w25q

*Korshakova, E., Marsh, J. K., & Kleinberg, S. (2022). Understanding health information sourcing and its implications for health beliefs. JMIR Formative Research, 6(9), e39274. https://doi.org/10.2196/39274

Marsh, J. K. (2022). Clearing the obstacles to adversarial collaborations for early career researchers. Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition, 11(1), 31-34. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000006

Marsh, J. K., *Coachys, C. N., & Kleinberg, S. (2022). The compelling complexity of conspiracy theories. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2185–2192). Cognitive Science Society. 

Marsh, J. K., Ungson, N. D., & Packer, D. J. (2021a). Bring out your experts: The relationship between perceived expert causal understanding and pandemic behaviors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27(4), 785–802. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000402

Marsh, J. K., Ungson, N. D., & Packer, D. J. (2021b). Of pandemics and zombies: The influence of prior concepts on COVID-19 pandemic-related behaviors. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(10), 5207. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18105207

*Czarnowski, D. W., & Marsh, J. K. (2021). Searching for the cause: Search behavior in explanation of causal chains. In T. Fitch., C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 646–652). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tb38798

Kleinberg, S., & Marsh, J. K. (2021). It's complicated: Improving decisions on causally complex topics. In T. Fitch., C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2437–2443). Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/18d6t38s

Packer, D. J., Ungson, N. D., & Marsh, J. K. (2021). Conformity and reactions to deviance in the time of COVID-19. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 24(2), 311–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430220981419

Vitriol, J. A. & Marsh, J. K. (2021). A pandemic of misbelief: How beliefs promote or undermine COVID-19 mitigation. Frontiers in Political Science, 3, 648082. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.648082

Kleinberg, S., & Marsh, J. K. (2020). Tell me something I don’t know: How perceived knowledge influences the use of information during decision making. In S. Denison., M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B.C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1849-1855). Cognitive Science Society. https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci20/papers/0410/0410.pdf

Marsh, J. K., *Zeveney, A. S., & De Los Reyes, A. (2020). Informant discrepancies in judgments about change during mental health treatments. Clinical Psychological Science, 8(2), 318–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702619894905

*Zheng, M., Marsh, J. K., Nickerson, J. V., & Kleinberg, S. (2020). How causal information affects decisions. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5, 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-0206-z

Teaching

Cognitive Psychology
Introduction to Psychology
Healthcare Reasoning and Decision-Making