Ward Edwards   Thomas Bayes

60th Edwards Bayesian Research Conference March 26-28, 2026

  plus March 29 Measurement and Model Testing & Birthday Event


In this conference, investigators present topics that might be empirical or theoretical, involving questions that may be basic or applied, and studying theories that may be normative or descriptive. Topics deal with judgment and decision theory, basic and applied, normative or descriptive, theoretical or empirical, and may include but NOT limited to Bayes theorem or Bayesian statistics.

Daniel Cavagnaro and Michael Birnbaum will co-host the 60th meetings on the campus of California State University, March 26-28, 2026. There will be a reception on the evening of Thursday, March 26, with meetings on Friday and Saturday, a session honoring the work of Allen Parducci, who passed away in 2023, a conference banquet Saturday night, and an extra event on Sunday with a dinner marking Michael Birnbaum's 80th birthday and 60th year program of research on Measurement and Model Testing applying Math-Psych to JDM.

To register for conference and/or submit a paper for presentation click here

Deadline to submit papers is January 26, 2026 for the 2026 meetings.

A Bit of History of these Meetings

The Bayesian Research Conference was hosted for 41 years by Ward Edwards, and for many years it was held each year in mid-February at the Sportsman's Lodge in Studio City, California. These meetings have been very high in quality, extremely diverse in topic and approach, and under Ward's leadership since 1961, they established a pattern of extremely fruitful, constructive, and congenial meetings. Starting with the 42nd meeting, the event has been held on the campus of California State University, Fullerton. It was organized by Michael Birnbaum for 10 years from 2004, jointly with Daniel Cavagnaro in 2013 and 2014, and Daniel has organized the conference for the last 10 years. This 60th year, the conference is again jointly organized. picture of Ward Edwards and Jim Shanteau

The 44th and succeeding conferences are now the Edwards Bayesian Research Conference, honoring Ward Edwards, a founder of the field of behavioral decision research, who passed away in early 2005. In this picture, Ward and Jim Shanteau, who was one of the founders of Society for Judgment and Decision Making in 1980, converse at an earlier meeting. As Ben Newall (2009) has written, "Ward Edwards is commonly regarded as the Father of behavioral decision making. In two papers, The Theory of Decision Making published in Psychological Bulletin in 1954 and Behavioral Decision Theory published in the Annual Review of Psychology in 1961 he founded and then subsequently gave a name to the field. Then in 1963 he introduced psychologists to Bayesian thinking with his paper Bayesian Statistical Inference for Psychological Research published in Psychological Review. These truly seminal papers have become part of the folklore of the field and their influence can hardly be overstated." To those accomplishments, one might add his paper in the Psychological Review on Subjective probabilities inferred from decisions in which Edwards introduced the idea of probability weighting functions that depend on the configuration of consequences, an idea that is central to Prospect Theory, which was co-authored by his former student, Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman.

The 2026 meeting will honor the memory of Allen Parducci, author of Range-Frequency Theory and an early leader in the fields of judgment and decision making and of human happiness, and it will also include the "60 years Math-Psych and JDM Research" and 80th birthday celebration for Michael Birnbaum and dinner on March 29.

Daniel Cavagnaro's email is DCAVAGNARO (at) FULLERTON.EDU

Michael Birnbaum's email is MBIRNBAUM (at) FULLERTON.EDU