Who am I and what do I work on?
My research explores how we make decisions, both individually and interactively. For example, we study questions such as how much risk we choose to take with a financial investment, or what strategies we decide on when playing a competitive or cooperative game with an opponent.
To answer these, we take a novel approach by combining the methods of behavioural experiments, functional brain imaging, and formal economic models. Examining sophisticated high-level behaviour at the neural level can provide important clues as to the fundamental mechanisms by which decision-making operates. A further goal of our group is to use the knowledge gleaned from these studies to inform public policy debates, for example in understanding how expectations play a role in financial, environmental, and health-care decisions.
What initiative do I represent?
I currently direct the Radboud Centre for Decision Science, an interdisciplinary initiative to create a university-wide community to work collaboratively on the question of how better understanding human decision-making can help address many of society’s biggest challenges. The twin goals of our Centre are to bring together researchers from a variety of academic disciplines to collaboratively investigate the mechanisms, processes, and consequences of human decision-making, and also to provide a platform to disseminate these findings to interested external parties and aid in applying emerging insights from decision science to public policy and practice.
Ultimately, we want to bridge the gap between research and applied settings, and also directly provide the public with tools to help improve the decision process. Our approach is very much problem-focussed, and we have identified several Societal Impact Areas, including Sustainability and Social Equality, where interested researchers from across different fields can work together on both research and applications.
What is our connection with the Healthy Brain pillar?
Decision-making is at the core of our lives, from individual choices that affect only ourselves (“Should I eat healthier?”) to social choices that can also impact others (“Should I recycle?”). In addition to the obvious inherent scientific interest of developing greater insight into perhaps our most essential human behavior, a better understanding of how people make choices is of paramount importance to public policy and practice, where more complete knowledge of how we decide can have real impact on people’s lives (“How can we ensure people make healthy decisions?” “How do we promote sustainable behavior”?). It is fundamental therefore to understand these choices both in terms of the individual mechanisms (both psychological and neural), as well as in how people interact at group and societal levels.
The work we conduct at the Center clearly directly connects with the Healthy Brain pillar, and this structure will allow us to collaborate more effectively with other campus research hubs such as the iHub, Hot Spot ID, Donders Institute, Behavioural Science Institute, and the Radboud UMC.