Decision Making

Jeffrey Stevens heads the Adaptive Decision Making Laboratory in the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research integrates cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to study decision making in humans and other animals. He holds a Ph.D. ecology, evolution and behavior from the University of Minnesota in 2002. He held a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Psychology Department at Harvard University and was a research scientist in the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In one recent study, he examined why some primate species wait for bigger rewards, while others grab what they can get immediately. Another revealed a new way to predict whether humans will pursue immediate gratification or wait for a bigger reward.