Research

Research Priorities: Foundations of decision-making, language acquisition, formation of arguments and judgements, human rationality

Ulrike Hahn is a German psychologist. The core focus of her research is the psychology of thinking, deciding and forming judgements. She is especially interested in the foundations of decision-making. Ulrike Hahn explores the basis on which good decisions are made and how rational individuals are when making decisions.

Human decision-making depends on the information on which it is based. While sensorimotor decisions are often quite accurate, decisions based purely on information are frequently more subjective. Humans also often make completely contradictory decisions, depending on whether they are relying on information gained from their own experiences or on descriptive information. Ulrike Hahn researches how people reach a judgement and how they make decisions. She deals with classic decision-making theory as well as flaws in reasoning, and systematically investigates these through the lens of cognitive psychology. She is especially interested in the factors on which people rely when making their decisions and which information they consider trustworthy for forming their opinions.

Ulrike Hahn’s team also explores the role chance plays in decision-making and how people perceive and asses this. She also focuses on the question of how people attempt to rationally explain mistakes. In other work she addresses philosophical questions such as what an argument is and what makes a good argument.

Ulrike Hahn investigates how reliable subjects consider a source and how this affects the subjects’ beliefs. In doing so the research team investigates the role of communicative social networks, which are rapidly gaining in significance for both expert and everyday decisions.

Ulrike Hahn’s other fields of research include language and the role of imitation learning in language acquisition as well as the early learning of a native language and the acquisition of additional languages.

In her research the cognitive psychologist links experiments and formal models such as the Bayesian model, a decision-making model based on the mathematical analysis of probabilities. Ulrike Hahn combines normative and descriptive observations in order to come closer to answering the question of how we make judgements and decisions. In an increasingly complex world her research topics continue to grow in significance.

Career

• 2015-2016 Visiting Professor, Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Munich, Germany
• since 2012 Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London,         London, UK
• Director, Centre for Cognition Computation and Modelling, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
• 2009-2012 Professor, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
• 1998-2012 Lecturer, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
• 1996-1998 Lecturer, Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
• 1996 PhD, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
• 1993-1994 Tutor for Law, Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
• 1993 Master in Cognitive Science and Natural Language, Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
• 1993 Second State Examination in Law, Munich, Germany
• 1989-1992 Legal Internship

Functions

• since 2015 Member, Editorial Board, Psychological Review
• 2008-2012 Action Editor, Psychological Bulletin & Review
• Member, Editorial Board, Topics in Cognitive Science

Honours and Memberships

• since 2022 Corresponding Member, Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Munich, Germany
• 2018 Computational Modeling Prize, Applied Cognition, Cognitive Science Society, Seattle, USA
• 2017 Honorary Doctorate, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
• since 2015 Member, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Germany
• 2014 Annaliese Maier Research Award, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn, Germany
• 2013 Kerstin Hesselgren Visiting Professorship, Swedish Research Council, Sweden
• 2011 Cognitive Section Prize, British Psychological Society, UK