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?
How do emotional reactions interact with (and inform) value-based decisions? (e.g., Shenhav & Greene, 2014; Shenhav & Karmarkar, 2019; Frömer, Dean Wolf, Shenhav, 2019; Frömer & Shenhav, 2022)
How is our decision process influenced by the presence of automatic biases, like habits, impulses, and defaults? (e.g., Shenhav et al., 2014; Miller, Shenhav, Ludvig, 2019; FeldmanHall & Shenhav, 2019)
What are the motivational barriers to exerting control?
What makes decision-making feel aversive? (e.g., Shenhav & Buckner, 2014; Shenhav, Dean Wolf, Karmarkar, 2018; Leng, Frömer, Shenhav, 2022)
What are downstream consequences of control costs? (e.g., Shenhav, Rand, Greene, 2012, 2017)
How can we reduce the costs of control?
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; Shenhav, Prater Fahey, Grahek, 2021)
How do we sustain (self-)control in the face of tempting alternatives? (e.g., Shenhav, 2017; Shenhav et al., 2018; Ritz & Shenhav, 2021)
Why do people differ in their willingness to engage in effortful tasks? (e.g., Grahek et al., 2019; Musslick, Cohen, Shenhav, 2018, 2019)