Efficiently responding to others’ emotions has great survival value, especially for social species, such as primates, who establish close, long-term bonds with group members. The closest living relatives to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Studying these species, and comparing them on the exact…

How do processes of coalition-formation influence patterns of decision-making in the European Union?

How can teachers be motivated by their students’ data in making stepwise changes to their teaching practices?

How do individuals make decisions? What determines the quality of group decisions? When and why do people cooperate with others? How does intergroup competition evolve?

In science, it is of vital importance that multiple studies corroborate the same result. Researchers therefore need to know all the details of previous experiments in order to implement the procedures as exactly as possible. However, this is becoming a major problem in neuroscience, as animal studies…

Our project focuses on the analysis of decision-making processes in the European Union (EU) and explores how approaches and tools to understand decision-making found in both the Natural and the Social Sciences can be linked, knowledge between these traditions exchanged and synergies utilized. To explore…

Simona Demková, Assistant professor at the Europa Institute of Leiden University, publishes her book ‘Automated Decision-Making and Effective Remedies: The New Dynamics in the Protection of EU Fundamental Rights in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’.

This minor focuses on how our thoughts, emotions and behaviour are influenced by other people, and how we influence other people.

During eye contact, people tend to mirror the pupil size of the person they are conversing with. This social mechanism is related to the trust an individual has in the person they are talking to, according to research by psychologists at Leiden University. Publication in PNAS.

Health inequities, obesity among children, loneliness, performance stress among youngsters. What are the drivers behind such ‘wicked problems’ and how might they be related? This interdisciplinary minor offers you the possibility to work with societal partners to gain a deeper understanding of real-life…

PACES is an innovative, inter-disciplinary and multi-level research project that asks, How do changes in society, individual life experiences and migration policy shape decisions to stay or to migrate over time and across countries? And how can this knowledge inform future migration policies and gov…

We present an extensive study of methods for exactly solving stochastic constraint (optimisation) problems (SCPs) in network analysis. These problems are prevalent in science, governance and industry.

The starting point for this research project is the notion that the human brain is susceptible to all kinds of fallacies and biases that affect our perceptions and influence our reasoning outside of our conscious awareness. Indeed, most people think they are merely observing facts and that they process…

PhD defence

Cognitive psychologists Eliska Prochazkova and Mariska Kret from Leiden University have won an Ig Nobel Prize for their research into the romantic click between people. They discovered that attraction between people can be predicted by synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance.

Research in Leiden University’s Institute of Political Science focuses on the dynamics and the interaction of political institutions, individual decision-making, and collective behaviour.

Müller, Braun & Fraussen examine the conditions under which commissioners appear in the news and which communication strategies they pursue.

As a research project between four Jean Monnet Chairs - two located in Europe, one in Canada and one in the U.S. -- the project DEUBAL has been approved in 2010 for co-financing by the European Commission. DEUBAL aims to study changes in European decision-making due to the Lisbon Treaty, by a combination…

What is the relation between the experience and the act of exclusion?

How do cognitive, motivational, and affective processes interact to select actions?

Nadine Raaphorst wrote an chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Administrative Justice about how two notions of fairness are studied in street-level bureaucracy literature and about the factors that influence how bureaucrats behave in this regard.

The focus of the Multicriteria Optimization and Decision Analysis (MODA) group is to develop foundations of methods in multi-objective optimization.

To easily take part in group decision-making research, Jörg Gross, Assistent Professor Social and Organisational Psychology, launched a platform that allows students at the social interaction lab. Sign up to receive invitations if you are interested in taking part in on-going scientific studies in the…

‘What a relief,’ was psychologist Mariska Kret’s reaction to the news of her Vidi grant from the national science financier NWO. The grant makes it possible for her to carry out new research into emotions and trust in patients with a social anxiety disorder and patients with autism.

On 20 March 2019, Tim Dekkers defended his thesis 'Mobility, Control and Technology in Border Areas: Discretion and Decision-making in the Information Age'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. J.P. van der Leun en Prof. dr. M.A.H. van der Woude.

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration…

The coronacrisis is emerging as the ultimate test for political leaders. How do national political leaders get ahead or behind ‘the curve’ of fast-changing dynamics. Martin Lodge (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Arjen Boin (Leiden University Institute of Political Science) look…

Promotor: A.P.IJzerman Co-promotor: A. Bender

PhD defence

Lecture

Synchronised heart rates and skin conductance tell us that people are attracted to each other. This explains why we feel a romantic ‘click’ with some people and not with others. This is the result of research by psychologist Eliska Prochazkova from the Leiden Institute for Brain and Recognition, which…

What is the neural basis of social decision-making across childhood, adolescence and adulthood and what are the developmental patterns in terms of behavior and brain activation?

The consequences of social tendencies for the legislation and institutions in the fields of social security, the labor market policy and pension reform are examined in this multdisciplinary research program..

This dissertation looks into the role of discretion granted by EU directives (Article 288 Treaty on Functioning of the European Union) in legislative decision-making and national transposition processes of these directives.

What are the essential determinants of (dis)trust? And, what are the effects of being (dis)trusted?

In this article, Marco Cinelli, assistant professor at Leiden University College The Hague, examines proper and improper uses of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods in energy systems analysis.

Why does social anxiety increase in adolescence and how does it grow out of control in some adolescents?

In this research note, Van der Does & Kantorowicz aruge that citizens that tend to experience political exclusion are often more supportive of direct and participatory forms of decision-making.

This project aims at studying the social media reception of African publications as covered by the most important “altmetric” sources.

On 20 & 21 April 2017 international researchers in the field of law and society and criminology presented their work in Brussels and shared ideas on discretion and decision-making.

This thesis, conducted in the framework of ERC Starting grant project BABYLON (PI: Caroline Waerzeggers), presents an investigation into Babylonian society, focusing on the city of Borsippa during Neo-Babylonian and early Persian rule (c. 620-484 BCE).

Conference

This dissertation takes an important step in understanding the phenomenon of non-take-up of social support and what it means for contemporary social policies.