Dr Yana Litovsky is an Assistant Professor in Behavioural Science. She holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon University and teaches on LSE's Executive MSc Behavioural Science programme. She researches information preferences and curiosity-driven behaviour, with a particular focus on health decision-making and misinformation. Her dissertation explored similarities in the way people value information and material goods, showing how well-documented biases and preference patterns from judgment and decision-making research — such as loss aversion — might explain how we engage with information.

Alongside lab and online experiments, Yana conducts crowd-based research, applying this novel methodology to study Covid-19 vaccine uptake and the Wisdom of the Crowd. She has also examined the psychology of news consumption and investigated how curiosity can be leveraged to encourage better health-related decisions. Currently, she is extending her work on curiosity to the study of misinformation in the digital space. Her work has been supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).