Centers

How do people make decisions in a complex and everchanging world? Classic theories of rationality often assume that there is a single best, typically computationally complex, strategy for decision making. The Center has a different view: that people can draw on an “adaptive toolbox” of simple strategies that have evolved or been learned in response to environmental demands and the mind’s limited cognitive resources. Whether or not a simple strategy will succeed depends on the fit between that strategy and the statistical structure of the environment—that is, on its ecological rationality. Understanding how cognitive and environmental structures fit together is the key to explaining and predicting human decision making.

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The Center was established with the aim of exploring the various aspects of emotions within the context of time and space. In the beginning, HoE focused mainly on reconstructing the norms and standards of past emotions and on the widely differing perceptions former generations had of emotions. In a second phase, the attention shifted to concepts and knowledge of emotions, which were seen as being embedded in social, cultural, and political contexts and closely linked to practices. Finally, emotions were not conceived, as in an earlier tradition, as something that was passively felt. Instead, they were conceptualized as something actively done, involving the mind, the heart, and the body alike.

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The Center conducts interdisciplinary science to understand, anticipate, and shape major disruptions from digital media and artificial intelligence (AI) to the way we think, learn, work, play, cooperate, and govern.
CHM’s goal is to understand how machines are shaping human society today and how they may continue to shape it in the future. The projects are organized in broad themes: Behavioral AI Safety & Ethics, Cooperative AI, AI-Mediated Communication, AI Governance, and AI-Driven Cultural Evolution.

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How do children steadily acquire knowledge about the world they live in, even though their memories of specific events are often quite vague? Which factors promote the preservation of cognitive abilities in old age? How does the brain change while we learn a new skill? These are some of the research questions currently investigated at the Center for Lifespan Psychology (LIP). LIP studies human development from infancy into old age. Using training studies, it explores hidden potentials by examining how brain plasticity is related to behavioral change. It participates in longitudinal studies to identify determinants and consequences of between-person differences in change.

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