Research Programme
Understanding the Conditions of Better Decision-Making
Decisions shape institutions, public policy and everyday life. Yet the quality of those decisions depends not only on the knowledge available to decision-makers, but also on the institutional, cognitive and normative conditions under which decisions are formed.
This research programme explores how those conditions can be better understood and deliberately designed.
Rather than focusing exclusively on how decisions are made or why they sometimes fail, the programme investigates the architectures that make more reliable, justified and principled decision-making possible.
Programme Overview
The central objective of this research programme is to understand how institutional, cognitive and normative architectures can be designed to enable decision-making processes that more faithfully realise the principles they are intended to serve.
Across many disciplines, considerable attention has been devoted to describing how decisions are made, explaining the mechanisms that shape judgement or identifying the biases that influence human reasoning.
This programme addresses a different question.
Instead of concentrating primarily on the processes that generate decisions, it investigates the conditions that make better decisions possible.
Its central concern is therefore not decision-making itself, but the design of the structures within which decision-making takes place.
An Interdisciplinary Approach
The programme is inherently interdisciplinary.
Law provides many of its empirical case studies, particularly because legal systems continually confront questions of evidence, responsibility, justification and institutional legitimacy.
However, the programme extends beyond legal scholarship by integrating insights from cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, behavioural science and institutional theory.
These disciplines are not treated as independent fields of enquiry, but as complementary sources of knowledge for understanding how complex systems of judgement can be designed to function more effectively.
Core Research Questions
The programme is organised around a series of interconnected questions, including:
- Under what conditions can institutions produce decisions that faithfully realise the principles that legitimise them?
- How should institutional environments be designed to reduce epistemic distortion and improve evidential evaluation?
- How can scientific knowledge be responsibly incorporated into legal and institutional decision-making?
- Which cognitive mechanisms enhance or undermine justified judgement?
- How should human judgement and artificial intelligence interact within complex decision systems?
- How can institutional architectures promote more reliable, transparent and legitimate forms of collective decision-making?
Current Research Areas
- Institutional Design
- Decision Processes and Cognitive Architecture
- Law and Cognitive Science
- Epistemology of Evidence
- Criminal Responsibility
- Behavioural Decision-Making
- Artificial Intelligence and Human Judgement
Current Research Projects
The programme currently develops these questions across several complementary research projects, including:
- the epistemology of evidence and legal decision-making;
- criminal responsibility and cognitive science;
- institutional architectures for scientific knowledge;
- behavioural environments and democratic resilience;
- human judgement in AI-assisted decision systems;
- interdisciplinary approaches to institutional design and public decision-making.
Long-Term Vision
The long-term ambition of this research programme is to contribute to a general framework for understanding how institutional, cognitive and normative architectures can be designed to improve the quality, legitimacy and reliability of decision-making across different domains of human activity.
Rather than proposing solutions confined to any single discipline, the programme seeks to identify principles capable of informing the design of institutions that better realise the values they exist to protect.