Highlighting Faculty Member Falk Lieder
scarusoucla
Date published: 02/07/25
How can psychological science better inform altruistic efforts to improve society and the lives of future generations? I strive to contribute to the theoretical foundations for such research by asking fundamental questions about rationality and altruism, as well as moral decision-making and moral learning.
Many societal decisions are based on economic theories built on a simplistic mathematical model of human decision-making that assumes that people are perfectly rational. My research on rationality aims to provide a more realistic mathematical theory of human decision-making (and cognition more broadly) that accounts for people’s bounded cognitive resources and limited time: resource rationality. My colleagues and I have applied this theory to derive process models of various cognitive abilities. Subsequently, my team and I have explored how our theory could, in principle, be applied to improve human decision-making by deriving and teaching optimal heuristics for difficult decisions. In a related line of research, my students and I investigate how learning from the outcomes of previous decisions can allow people to discover more effective decision strategies.
My colleagues and I in the Rational Altruism Lab seek to extend these three lines of research to decision-making in social dilemmas and complex moral decisions. I am especially interested in how learning from the consequences of previous decisions shapes the cognitive strategies people use to make moral decisions. We combine computational modeling, rigorous behavioral experiments, and self-report measures to identify the underlying learning mechanisms and how they interact with attention and systematic reflection. I hope this line of investigation will help us understand under which conditions people’s morality becomes more inclusive of distant others and under which conditions it becomes more tribal. I enjoy sharing my passion for these topics with the students of my lectures and seminars on rationality and altruism.
Bio: I was born in a country that no longer exists and grew up in Germany. In high school, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to explore social psychology research on societal issues and computational modeling of visual search. The contrast between these two types of research taught me the value of rigorous methods, precise mathematical theories, and computational modeling. I, therefore, complemented my undergraduate education in cognitive science with a degree in mathematics and computer science, conducted research in computational neuroscience, and obtained a master’s degree in Neural Systems and Computation from ETH Zurich (Switzerland). My PhD in Tom Griffiths’s computational cognitive science lab at UC Berkeley allowed me to apply my computational skills to interesting questions about decision-making and learning. I then continued and expanded this research program as a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (Germany). My academic journey came full circle when I joined the psychology department of UCLA in July 2023. Now, I am back to investigating the kinds of societally relevant questions that first sparked my interest in psychology, and I am investigating them with the rigorous experimental, mathematical, and computational methods that I have always been drawn to.
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