Robert MacCoun
Psychologist and law professor
Robert MacCoun is a psychologist and Stanford law professor who studies decision making and social influence. He co-wrote Third Millennium Thinking.
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American Born 1958
About Robert MacCoun
Robert MacCoun holds the Kowal professorship in law at Stanford Law School and trained as a social psychologist. His research covers individual and group decision making, social influence, justice, and bias in how scientists, journalists and citizens read research evidence. He has also published many studies on drug use and drug policy. He moved to Stanford in 2014, after teaching at UC Berkeley's law school and its Goldman School of Public Policy from 1993. Between 1986 and 1993 he worked as a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. He has also written about the US military's policy on gay and lesbian service members, known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". The Association for Psychological Science honored him in 2019 with its James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award. With physicist Saul Perlmutter and philosopher John Campbell, he wrote Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense, published in 2024. Outside work, he spent a dozen years playing jazz guitar in bars and restaurants.