Alan Sanfey

Career sketch

Alan Sanfey is Principal Investigator at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior at Radboud University Nijmegen since 2009. He is also Associate Professor at University of Arizona since 2004. Before his work as Associate Professor he was a post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University from 2001 untill 2003. Before that he achieved a PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Colorado in June 2001.

Irrationality in social decision-making

The study of how people make decisions and judgments has a long tradition in many academic disciplines. A major focus of psychological approaches to describing decision-making has been to demonstrate that in certain situations people are prone to making 'irrational' decisions. Indeed, this approach, known as the heuristics and biases approach, has been extremely influential in building models of decision-making. In more recent years the study of decision-making has been extended to examining social decisions, that is, decisions made in the presence of another, involved, agent. In these situations it is also possible to use experimental paradigms which appear to demonstrate irrationality on the part of the decision-maker. In my talk I will describe some findings from social decision-making studies we have conducted in our group, and discuss why current definitions of irrationality are perhaps too limiting in understanding the motivations behind these decisions. By employing research approaches from multiple disciplines, including economics, psychology and neuroscience, I will examine how more complex motivations can be uncovered which can add to our ideas about how rational human decisions really are.