Research statement

I am a philosopher and interdisciplinarian working on the basic agentive processes of decision-making and self-control, and on explaining individual differences in behavior. My inquiry into this theme spans philosophical subdisciplines, and I have worked in the areas of applied ethics (especially neuroethics), agency and responsibility, and philosophy of cognitive science (especially psychiatry). I often work closely with empirical scientists across the behavioural and brain sciences.

Decision-making and self-control capacities are often perceived as individualistic, exhaustively neurological, and apolitical. However, recognizing the significant impact of situational factors on these cognitive processes challenges this notion and reveals that social and structural practices can either facilitate or impede their functioning. More mechanistically, understanding decision-making and control in rich environments highlights the crucial role of attention, e.g., visual sampling, on these processes.

Agency and self-control. My most extensive research program probes the concept of self-control in philosophy and social psychology. In a series of publications, I have argued for a revision of our understanding of self-control by applying arguments found within the philosophy of disability to the question of self-control, arguing that self-control is best understood in functionalist, externalist terms, and that individual differences in self-control are best understood in terms of differences in access to self-control behaviours. I am currently working on a monograph on self-control, under the working title Against Willpower. Drawing on my research on the biological and social constituents of individual differences in self-control, the book will argue that they have little to do with so-called willpower. It’s divided into two parts: the first covers self-control’s function using evidence from cognitive and behavioural sciences, while the second explores implications for psychopathology, intergenerational poverty, and criminology.

Individual differences, psychiatry, and neurodiversity. My second, overlapping research programme examines causal, conceptual and metaphysical issues in complex traits, particularly within psychiatry. From 2016 to 2019, I participated as Junior Investigator in the Genetics and Human Agency research project, which gave me a sustained interest in thinking about gene-environment interaction in the context of individual differences in complex traits. I have also inquired into the metaphysics of psychopathology, including the ways in which social phenomena interact with individual biology in the ontology of mental disorder.

Decision-making and attention. My main new research agenda explores decision-making in complex environments. Both the inputs and the feasible behavioural outputs for a given decision are myriad. Attentional processes, such as sampling, play an important role in reducing the search space. To understand decision-making and action, we therefore need to also understand how attentional processes intersect with classic decision, volition, and action processes. To that effect, I am currently working on a descriptive account of what options are, i.e., under what constraints can something be a constituent in a decision set. If my account of options turns out to withstand scrutiny, that has interesting implications. For example, it challenges Bayesian decision theory; suggests a possible causal explanation for behavioural traits in ADHD and Autism, characterised by differences in attention and sensory processing; and gives rise to a possible novel mechanism underlying behavioural interventions, such as nudging.