30 June 2026, by Uğur Turhan

In this new article by Erik and Sebastian, alongside former team member Sophie Bavard, we examined how predictions of other's choices are implemented.

By experimentally biasing participants' risk preferences and applying computational modelling, we show that people engage their own decision system to generate predictions of others' decisions and that the fundamental cognitive mechanisms do not differ across decisions and predictions. Interestingly, such overlap did not extend to predictions for individuals with a very strong risk preference profile, suggesting that people may only use their own decision style as a reference for predicting others who are not too distinct.

Overall, our study supports the view that people use their own mind to simulate the decisions of (most) others.

Link to the full article.