Cognition and Social Behaviour

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Modern society is characterized by an increasing number of challenges such as vastly increasing health care costs, climate change, and (the threat of) digitalization. These challenges often require people to adapt and change their daily behaviour in a social context. Therefore, a major challenge for scientists, policy-makers and professionals who are interested in optimizing human behaviour is to understand and appreciate the mechanisms that enable to change social behaviour on the long run. Whereas behaviour can be controlled without the involvement of a person (e.g., changes in environment or law enforcement), other approaches rely on self-resilience and personal autonomy by taking the psychological processes underlying human behaviour into account. In this research program, we conduct research and teach students to investigate the role of cognition in social behaviour. In particular, we address how people control their behaviour by setting their own goals, execute actions, and form or overcome habits in a social context.

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We study our questions at several levels of operation, including perception, cognition and interaction in social context, and address how motivation and emotion impinge on each of these levels. We also examine how (neuro)physiological processes contribute to behaviour in social context. Our program addresses basic and applied research in the context of (mental) health, sustainability and digitalization. The research is mainly experimental to study causal mechanisms, using knowledge and methods from social, behavioural and neuroscience. We also conduct survey research to examine associations between people's subjectively reported feelings, thoughts, and actions.

Collaboration

We collaborate with other researchers in different disciplines in the UU Strategic themes Institutions for Open Societies and Dynamics of Youth, and the Focus Area Human-centered AI and Alliance programme HUMAN-AI. We also collaborate with several stakeholders in the public and private sector, such as UMCU, Erasmus MC, Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, Fontys University of Applied Sciences, the Custodial Institutions Agency, the Center for Crime Prevention and Security, Unilever, and Dialogic.

Our Teaching

At University Utrecht, we teach in several courses at the undergraduate and (research) master level. We are involved in:

We strongly embrace team science and consider research and teaching as two sides of the same coin.

Team