Benedek Kurdi.

Benedek Kurdi, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has joined the Beckman Institute.

An experimental psychologist, Kurdi seeks to understand the immense power and the surprising limitations of our minds in adaptively responding to new information given a lifetime of learning. Kurdi examines learning in the context of basic social processes, specifically studying the ordinary decisions we make every day that are critical to our well-being and even survival: our evaluations of and beliefs about other people.

His research at the Beckman Institute will use advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to understand shared cultural representations of social groups and how such shared representations find their way into individual minds via processes of learning and memory. His key collaborator at Beckman is Babak Hemmatian.

"Addressing the most pressing problems facing humanity today will be impossible without interdisciplinary collaboration. In my own work, I am interested in both how learning about other people unfolds in individual human minds and how such learning is modulated by constraints present in the broader social environment, such as different forms of societal inequality," he said. "My affiliation with the Beckman Institute will allow me to think in more interdisciplinary and systemic ways and hopefully also to contribute some of my own background and insights to this vibrant community."

Kurdi earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 2019. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Cornell Department of Psychology and the Yale Department of Psychology.