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Principal Investigator

Daniel Balliet

My research focuses on understanding Human Cooperation. I apply experiments, field studies, and meta-analysis to test evolutionary and psychological theories of cooperation. My work addresses issues related to (a) how people think about their interdependence in social interactions, (b) how people condition their cooperation to acquire direct and indirect benefits, and (c) understanding cross-societal variation in cooperation. I am the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) and ERC Consolidator Grant (2020-2025).

 

Principle Investigator

Paul Van Lange

Paul A. M. Van Lange is Professor of Social Psychology at the VU Amsterdam, Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and holds a Global Professorship at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on human cooperation and trust, including empathy, fairness, conflict and aggression, as well as broad societal topics such as climate change, norm violations, and refugees. He gives annual workshops to mayors and other professionals in the Netherlands and Europe.    

 

 

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Postdoc

Bernd Dudzik

My research is situated in the areas of Affective Computing and Social Signal Processing. It focuses on enabling technological systems to infer cognitive and affective states from data about human behavioral cues using multimodal machine learning. I am particularly interested in developing context-sensitive approaches for this kind of computer-based behavioral analysis. By accounting for person- and situation-specific influences on the underlying psychological processes driving human behavior, these have the potential for automatic inferences that are more accurate and robust across different scenarios in the real world. I am currently exploring the computational modeling of social perception processes and partner selection choices in collaborative interactions based on behavioral data about the involved individuals.

stijn round
PhD Student

Leonard (Stijn) Peperkoorn

I consider my field of research, cooperation, a very important area of research as it has implications for policy makers and planners. As I learned more about social dilemma research from my colleagues, group size became my focus. Over the next four years as a PhD candidate, I will conduct new investigations on group size, work effectively with and learn from great minds within the social dilemma domain, and review the literature in meta-analytic studies.

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PhD Student

Tiffany Matej

My research interest focuses on understanding (a) which social cues and evidence affect inferences individuals make about their social partners, especially in the domain of trust and cooperation, (b) how can these information be used to predict, faciliate or/and optimize partner selection, (c) how other contextual variables (i.e. interdependence, social distance) contribute to shaping cooperative behavior. In my studies, I want to apply an interdisciplinary approach, combining psychology, cognitive and computer science.

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ranran_round
PhD Student

Ranran Li

I am interested in people’s cooperative behaviors in real-world and economic games, specifically, what kind of people and under what circumstances will people behave more cooperatively. The former helps identify those people, whereas the latter helps stimulate cooperation in the applied settings. I wish to contribute to the game-based personality assessment by incorporating cooperative game tasks. In addition to experimental studies, I’m keen on learning new research paradigms like computational modeling, social network analysis, etc.

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selene_round
PhD Student

Selene Baez

I am a student under the Spinoza Prize project “Understanding Language by Machines”. My research focuses on trust, explicitly investigating how robots could navigate the real world and form complicated relationships with people just like we do. My work aims to create and evaluate a computational model of trust, from a robot’s perspective towards trusting humans in collaborative tasks. For this, I apply complementary Artificial Intelligence techniques (from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Symbolic Knowledge Representation).

 


FORMER PhD STUDENTS

Simon Columbus: University of Copenhagen

Mengchen Dong:  Max Planck Institute, Berlin

Fabiola Gerpott: WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management

Shuxian Jin: University of Sussex

Nils Köbis:  Max Planck Institute, Berlin

Cristhian Martinez:  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Catherine Molho: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Jan Pletzer: Erasmus Universiteit

Angelo Romano: University of Leiden, Netherlands 

Niels van Doesum: University of Leiden, Netherlands

Junhui Wu: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

COLLABORATORS

Brock Bastian: University of Melbourne, Australia

Bianca Beersma: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Robert Böhm: University of Vienna, Austria

Terence das Dores Cruz: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Carsten de Dreu: University of Leiden, Netherlands 

Reinout de Vries: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Simon Gaechter: University of Nottingham

Caroline Graf: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Kimmo Eriksson: Märlardalen University, Sweden

Kelly Kirkland: University of Melbourne, Australia

Eleanor Lieberman: Performance Measurement and Evaluation Fellow

Annika Nieper: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Francesca Righetti: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Bela Rinderu: Brand and Cross-media scientist

Hannes Rusch: University of Maastricht, Netherlands 

Giuliana Spadaro: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Pontus Strimling: Insitutute for Future Studies at Stockholm, Sweden

Kristen Syme: University of Leiden, Netherlands 

Ilaria Tiddi: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Isabel Thielmann: Max Planck Institute

Joshua Tybur: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Evert van de Vliert: University of Groningen (Prof Emeritus), Netherlands

Olmo van den Akker: Tilburg University

Piek Vossen: Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Toshio Yamagishi: Hitotsubashi University

Mingliang Yuan: Beijing Normal University