Speakers
Overview
connects to public policy. To do so we invited three speakers that are acutally dedicated to translating their work into societal relevant actions. They each draw on very different disciplines. One talk focused on participatory methods, game theory, serious gaming, and problem-structuring, for supporting decision-making in complex, multi-actor settings where interests conflict and outcomes are uncertain. A second brought the perspective of empirical legal studies, examining how law functions in practice and how empirical evidence about human behaviour can inform legal design and access to justice. A third offered a cognitive psychology perspective on learning, action, and social cognition, and an example of how to translate findings directly by collaborating with local educational institutions.
Key Points
Good policy decisions in complex, multi-stakeholder settings require more than better information; they require structured processes that make competing interests visible and create conditions for genuine deliberation, using tools like game theory and serious gaming developed through work with Dutch ministries, municipalities, and the national police.
Studying how law actually works in practice, rather than how it is assumed to work, reveals gaps between what behavioural science knows about decision-making under uncertainty and what legal systems typically assume about rational, autonomous choice, with direct consequences for access to justice and dispute resolution.
A "cognition is for action" perspective frames learning, memory, and social understanding as fundamentally oriented toward upcoming decisions, with implications for how educational and public-health policy might be designed around how people actually learn and predict others' behaviour.
Open question: What does it mean to do genuinely policy-relevant research without compromising scientific rigour, and are the most productive collaborations those where researchers and policymakers shape questions together, rather than science simply handing findings to policy?
Next Steps
Possible collaborations: connecting participatory and formal decision methods with behavioural and legal evidence, and building iterative partnerships between researchers and policymakers that shape questions jointly and interpret results in context.
If you are interested in public policy and decision-making and would like to connect with the speakers or suggest a speaker for another session, contact us at centerfordecisionscience@ru.nl.