Leadership, organisational change (e.g. EDI) and technology (e.g. AI)
My research explores how leadership and organisational change can improve performance and lead to positive outcomes. Moreover, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), new opportunities have a risen for greater value creation in private and listed organisations and for the public sector. To capitalise on the potential of AI and wider changes in organisations, leaders need to create a culture of experimentation, data-driven decision-making and a focus on measurable performance.
Our paper “Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content” published in Science Advances (2024) shows that AI can help people be more creative (especially those who are inherently less creative) – but there are also potential trade-offs: in aggregate, when people rely on AI, their collective creativity (i.e, the diversity of novel ideas in the group) is reduced. Read more about it on NPR.
In our Science paper “Behaviorally designed training leads to more diverse hiring” (2025), we address the shortcomings of typically ineffective corporate diversity training: We test a new diversity training through a large-scale field experiment in a global telecommunications and engineering firm, finding that a combination of diversity salience, timeliness, task specificity, and the delivery by an organizational authority figure in the short training increases the shortlisting and hiring of underrepresented groups.
In our paper “Catch me if you can: Using machine learning and behavioral interventions to reduce unethical behavior” published in Behavioural Public Policy (2025), we show how machine learning techniques can be used by organisations, including in the public sector, to identify social benefits claimants who are most likely to commit fraud and test the effectiveness of behavioural interventions to reduce unethical behaviour.
Fairness and social preferences
My research focuses on the emergence and maintenance of fairness, cooperation and altruism. Fairness is integral to the functioning of society, achieving top performance in organisations and levelling the playing field. I explore these themes to address questions around poverty and inequality in society, large scale public goods like sustaining the environment, and collaboration and equality in firms.
Our paper “Cooperating with the future” published in Nature (2014) lays bare the challenge of intergenerational cooperation: when there is no way to reciprocate previous generations’ kind (or unkind) behaviour, how do we establish and maintain sustainable behaviours? In this paper, we focus on the role of institutions—in particular, democracy—in maintaining intergenerational cooperation. If you are interested to learn more, there’s a short video and a helpful commentary that tells you more about this work. You can also read more about it in the Huffington Post.
Our Nature paper “Social dilemmas among unequals” (2019) studies how cooperation is affected by multiple inequalities. Using evolutionary game theory, we show that inequalities in incomes and productivities can undermine the evolution of cooperation – but there are conditions when things can get better too. An experiment illustrates some of these key take-aways. Read more about it on Bloomberg.
In our paper “Believed gender differences in social preferences” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2024), we examine to what extent people believe men and women differ in generosity, cooperativeness, trustworthiness, and other social behaviours. While there are no systematic differences in men and women’s actual behaviours, we observe a persistent believed gender gap – i.e., women are believed to be more generous, cooperative and socially-minded than men. Our findings suggest childhood upbringing play an important role in memory and belief formation, and that these inaccurate beliefs have consequences for the workplace (e.g. who we want to work for).
To see a list of my research publications, click here.