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my research focuses on how the brain makes decisions and we study decision-making in a number of contexts
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under conditions of uncertainty and risk when the world is complicated by the behavior of others and we try to
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understand what mechanisms in the brain actually drive us to make the decisions that we do to make the choices we make
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when we make a decision say you choose to buy a stock or sell it short or to eat a doughnut instead of an apple why
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do you make that decision that's a key question for us and we approach that question using a number of different
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techniques one way we do this is to study the behavior of people making choices and to study what happens in
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their brains when they make those choices we also compare these choices to those of animals when they're making
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very similar kinds of decisions and then we can look at what happens in their brains when they make these choices and
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what are the fascinating takeaways from our research is that people and animals tend to make very similar kinds of
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decisions when they are in similar kinds of contexts and moreover their brains seem to make these decisions using a
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similar set of mechanisms so what this means is that we can infer that much of our own behavior the choices we make
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even in a very complex situation such as a market are driven by forces that have
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all the long time ago to solve the kinds of problems that animals need to solve such as finding food finding a mate
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making friends and allies that will help to solve the problems that they need to
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solve I think we're all aware that the kinds of choices we make are very influenced
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by the people around us and in fact this is very true of other animals as well and one thing that we have learned from
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studying the choices that animals make and the choices that people make and what happens in their brains when they
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make these choices that they're very specific highly specialized mechanisms that detect the presence of other
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individuals identify who they are evaluate their importance to us and allow us to learn from their behavior
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more recently we've identified a very specific set of brain cells that actually responds when another
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individual feels a reward what's a really interesting and important potential practical application of this
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discovery is that we might find ways either behaviorally or pharmacologically or using other means to activate these
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cells and if we did so we might be able to promote charitable giving donation to
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public goods and other kinds of pro-social behaviors and this could be a very important and practical way of
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enhancing the welfare of society we're now building on the work that we've done looking at the brain
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mechanisms that respond to our social environment we're now looking at those
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processes in the brain that allow us to learn from the experiences of other individuals to use that information to
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guide our choices and how that information might be used to behave strategically with regard to another
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individual so when do we cooperate when do we defect when do we deceive others how can we understand these how this
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happens in the brain and how can we change it if we want to make better decisions
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you