News
January, 11, 2026
Tim van Timmeren about habits and new year resolutions (Dutch news article).
January, 8, 2026
Baptist Liefooghe about trust in AI (Dutch radio interview).
November, 20, 2025
Talk: Shaping social evaluations and behavior through instrumental learning
November, 20, 2025, 16:00 - 17:00, Faculty Room (Langeveld building 3.14).
How do we learn about other people? We are excited to welcome Tjits van Lent to the Goallab to present her PhD research on the role of instrumental learning in shaping how we evaluate individuals and social categories. She will guide us through her research projects, which examine how instrumental learning shapes evaluations at the individual level, as well as how it operates at the group level to influence behaviors such as emotion recognition. Finally, she will discuss the consequences of these individual and group evaluations for social decision-making.
Tjits’s interest in this topic stems from her general focus on understanding processes of behavior change. In her PhD project, she investigated learning processes within the fields of impression formation and prejudice. To illustrate the relevance of her work, she points to the well-known “contact hypothesis”: the idea that contact with individuals from different social categories positively influences our impressions. Her work experimentally examines the specific components of contact that contribute to this positive influence, while importantly also investigating how the absence of contact shapes our impressions.
There is also a nice historical connection to our lab: two of Tjits’s supervisors, Erik Bijleveld and Harm Veling, are former members of the Goallab. In addition, Tjits is postdoc in our department since this summer and so we are very excited for her talk!
November, 4, 2025
Video game as an experimental paradigm for studying habit change in ecological settings?
Talk on 4 November 2025, 13.00 - 14.00, E1.24, Langeveld building
We are excited to welcome our second speaker Dr. Chao Zhang back to the Goallab to talk about habits and video-games.
In his presentation, Chao is going to propose a game-based paradigm as an alternative to the current methodologies that tend to rely on training in artificial settings or self-report in real-world settings. He will share his plans for an upcoming research project that revolves around developing a game that would be suited to study habits.
Chao became interested in habit research during his PhD, partially because of his general interest in automatic/unconscious influences on human behavior, but also because he could relate to the power of habits (both positive and negative) in his own life. He points to the habits that people developed during the Covid-19 pandemic to highlight the universality of habits and the strong influence they have on our lives. A fitting example, because Chao was a postdoc in the Goallab during parts of the pandemic, so we are excited to welcome him back without any of the restrictions we needed then.
October, 16, 2025
Upcoming Goal Lab Talk on 16 October 2025 with Dr. Erik Bijleveld on Fatigue during and after mental work.
We’re excited to welcome Dr. Erik Bijleveld back to the Goallab for an upcoming talk on one of the most universal human experiences, mental fatigue.
16.00, Faculty room, Langeveld building, Utrecht University.
August, 30, 2025
Jurriaan te Koppele, our newest member of the Goallab who recently completed his PhD at Wageningen University, showed in his dissertation that emotions often motivate goal-directed behavior, especially when people can freely choose their situations. Thus, emotions do not always solely drive hedonic choices. He recently presented his work on the Dutch radio show Dr Kelder en Co.
March, 14, 2023
16:00 – 17:00
Location: Ruppert D
Speaker: Poppy Watson (UNSW, Sydney)
Defining and Measuring Habits Across Different Fields of Research
Habits play an important role in our everyday behavioural repertoire but they are conceptualised and measured differently across different fields of research. I will briefly compare the way that habits are defined and measured by associative learning theorists, health and social psychologists and those interested in the development of motor skills. The associative or knowledge structures that form once a habit has been acquired also differ across these fields. Current experimental work aimed at uncovering elusive Stimulus-Response habits will be discussed.
March, 23, 2023
16:00 – 17:00
Location: Ruppert Paars
Speaker: Jan De Houwer (Ghent University)
Learning in Individual Organisms, Genes, Machines, and Groups: A New Way of Defining and Relating Learning in Different Systems
Learning is a central concept in many scientific disciplines. Communication about research on learning is, however, hampered by the fact that different researchers define learning in different ways. In this paper, we introduce the extended functional definition of learning that can be used across scientific disciplines. We provide examples of how the definition can be applied to individual organisms, genes, machines, and groups. Using the extended functional definition (a) reveals a heuristic framework for research that can be applied across scientific disciplines, (b) allows researchers to engage in intersystem analyses that relate the behavior and learning of different systems, and (c) clarifies how learning differs from other phenomena such as (changes in) behavior, damaging systems, and programming systems.
February, 7, 2023
XS grants from SSH Open Competition for six FSBS researchers.
January, 11, 2023
Bringing expertise together! Combating low literacy with Artificial Intelligence in the ELSA lab.
October 28, 2021
The department of Psychology at Utrecht University has an opening for a Post-doctoral (2-years + 1 year optional) position: Psychology and Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence. APPLICATION DEADLINE Nov 9, 2021.
For more information, please visit the profile page of Henk Aarts.
March 2021
Josi Driessen and Henk Aarts received a grant from Programma Handhaving and Gedrag to study the following project:
The obedient brain/ Het gehoorzame brein
Regulations and law enforcement contribute to the prevention of undesirable behavior and thus play an important role in society. At the same time, restricting behavior through regulations undermines personal autonomy; after all, people are no longer, or to a lesser extent, allowed to decide for themselves what to do. Recent findings suggested that restrictions in personal autonomy have an impact on how we experience our own actions and their consequences. People who experience their own behavior as voluntary are more likely to recognize that they are responsible for their behavior. In this research project, we will investigate whether obedience to rules and enforcement can have unintended negative side-effects on how we experience our own actions and how this affects our behavior. In this research we will focus on questions such as: Will people experience their behavior as less voluntary if they obey the rules? What does this do to their feelings of responsibility? How do we find the right balance between enforcement, obedience and the experience of agency?
February 2021
Embodied AI: Virtual Humans and Social Robots #1
Monday 22 February 14:30 - 16:00
This event is the first of a series of events we plan to organize related with Embodied Artificial Agents, organized by Zerrin Yumak, Maartje de Graaf and Ruud Hortensius. It concerns the development, evaluation and societal impact of social robots and virtual humans that are capable of engaging in face-to-face social interactions with people using verbal and non-verbal behaviours. The theme of the first event is: “Understanding the Utrecht University case, what are the different viewpoints, challenges and opportunities?”
November 2020
Ruud Hortensius received a public engagement seed fund from Utrecht University for the following project:
Opa, oma, robot en ik / Grandpa, grandma, robot and I
While generations apart, children and their grandparents share a future with robots. In this project, they will start the conversation on the integration of robots in their social milieu. First, they will play an interactive quiz to explore the scope and limits of robots for social cognition. Next, they will develop sci-fi scenarios using a real robot to sketch future applications. Focussing on real interactions and the conversation with, not about, children and grandparents, this project will give this team the power to shape future research and their social lives with robots.
September 2020
- NEW: “Postdoc position in the project “Empowering Human Intentions through Artificial Intelligence” at Utrecht University.
Application deadline: 15 October 2020
> More information
- Chao Zhang and Henk Aarts received a grant from the UU focus area Human-Centered AI! Interesting work ahead with Shihan Wang and Mehdi Dastani on human autonomy and autonomous AI.
- The website of our multidisciplinary research and education program on human autonomy perspective of artificial intelligence has been launched: https://human-ai.nl/
