Experimental
My experimental research focuses on the cognitive science of altruism, where I use both mathematical modelling and experimental research to understand how people make altruistic and moral decisions. In one ongoing project on moral learning, my collaborators and I developed a new reinforcement learning task to understand how people learn to rely more on rules vs. cost-benefit reasoning. In another project, we are working on developing a new task to study how people reason about extinction risks. I have conducted research on a variety of other topics related to moral and altruistic decision-making, such as scope insensitivity, speciesism , and long-term thinking.
Methodological
Apart from trying to incorporate advanced methodology and Open Science practices in my experimental research, I also develop new statistical methods for social science research. Together with my collaborators, I developed robust Bayesian meta-analysis (RoBMA) a new meta-analytical method to correct for publication bias. We showed in a simulation study as well as in applied examples that RoBMA outperforms existing methods to adjust for publication bias. We also recently applied RoBMA to a meta-analysis on nudging and found no evidence for the mean effect of nudging after adjusting for publication bias. I have also taken an interest in the theory crisis in psychology and developed a computational model for theory comparison using the Ising model by analogizing the components of a theory to elemental magnets. We showed on examples from the history of science that our model correctly prefers theories that were later adopted by the scientific community.
Funding
