Gary Klein

Gary Klein, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist at MacroCognition LLC. Dr. Klein received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. He spent the first phase of his career in academia as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Oakland University (1970-1974). The second phase was spent working for the government as a research psychologist for the U.S. Air Force (1974-1978). The third phase began in 1978 when he founded his own R&D company, Klein Associates, which grew to 37 people by the time it was acquired by Applied Research Associates (ARA) in 2005 Dr. Klein has developed several models of cognitive processes: A Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model to describe how people actually make decisions in natural settings; a Data/Frame model of sensemaking; a Management by Discovery model of planning to handle wicked problems; and a Triple-Path model of insight.

He has also developed several research and application methods: The Critical Decision method and Knowledge Audit for doing cognitive task analysis; the PreMortem method of risk assessment; and the ShadowBox method for training cognitive skills. He was instrumental in founding the field of Naturalistic Decision Making.

He is a Fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. In 2008 he received the Jack A. Kraft Innovator Award from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He has written: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (1998); The Power of Intuition (2004); Working Minds: A practitioner's guide to Cognitive Task Analysis (Crandall, Klein, & Hoffman, 2006); Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the keys to adaptive decision making (2009); Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights (2013).