Uri Hertz

Human knowledge relies on social learning. Most of what we know comes not from first-hand experience, but by learning from others, and by adhering to others’ advice. Regardless of its usefulness, information sharing plays a major role (maybe its original role) in maintaining and enhancing social bonds and promoting one’s own social influence and status, similar to grooming behaviour in apes.

As a cognitive neuroscientist, I'm fascinated by the way we try to influence each other, and make decisions together. How do psychological biases affect the way we share information? How do we choose who to learn from? And what happens when communication fails? I am trying to piece together an answer to these puzzles by using online and lab based games, computational models, and neuroimaging.

I am a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, in the Department of Cognitive Sciences, where I head the social decision making lab. Previously, I was part of an interdisciplinary team including neuroscientists and philosophers working on The Human Mind Project. I was also part of the Crowd Cognition group in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in UCL, where we examine the way small groups and crowds make decisions. Before that, I did my PhD in computational neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation (ICNC), where I studied multisensory integration and perception in Amir Amedi's lab.