Decision-making research focuses on how we deliberate over costs and benefits of our options (e.g., comparing apples & oranges)
Cognitive control research focuses on how we exert cognitive effort to overcome our automatic biases (e.g., naming the color a word appears in vs. reading the word itself)
We are interested in answering questions about the intersection between these processes:
How do automatic processes interact with our cost-benefit analyses?
What are the neural and computational signatures of each element of a decision? (Frömer, et al., 2019; Collins & Shenhav, 2022; Frömer & Shenhav, 2022; Frömer et al., 2022, 2024)
How do emotional reactions interact with (and inform) value-based decisions? (e.g., Shenhav & Greene, 2014; Shenhav & Karmarkar, 2019)
How are decisions influenced by automatic biases (e.g, habits, impulses, defaults)? (e.g., Shenhav et al., 2014, 2016; Miller et al., 2019; FeldmanHall & Shenhav, 2019; Fontanesi et al., 2022)
What are the motivational barriers to exerting control?
What makes decision-making feel aversive? (e.g., Shenhav & Buckner, 2014; Shenhav et al., 2018; Kim et al., 2022; Leng et al., 2024)
What are downstream consequences of control costs? (e.g., Shenhav, Rand, Greene, 2012, 2017)
How can we reduce the costs of control? (e.g., Leng et al., 2024; Su & Shenhav, 2024)
How do we choose to overcome these barriers?
How do we decide what kind(s) and how much control to allocate? (e.g., Shenhav, Botvinick, Cohen, 2013, 2016; Shenhav et al., 2017; 2021; Frömer et al., 2021; Leng et al., 2021)
How do we sustain (self-)control in the face of tempting alternatives? (e.g., Shenhav, 2017; Shenhav et al., 2018; Ritz & Shenhav, 2021, 2022)
Why do people differ in their willingness to engage in effortful tasks? (e.g., Grahek et al., 2019; Musslick et al., 2018, 2019; Bustamante et al., 2022)