People

In the story of the stone soup, a soldier convinces a village to come together and make soup out of ingredients that they were all individually hoarding in their houses, while going hungry, by the expedient of placing an allegedly magical stone in a pot of water. I think of my role in a similar light; I serve as an excuse for young people to ask interesting questions and learn about the nature of behavior.

Hi, Hari here. I think about quitting. My work focuses on defining the principles behind when people decide to quit an activity. I use behavioral field experiments and large-scale datasets to describe this phenomena. Besides my academic shenanigans, I also run and play video games. Lastly, this bio does not encompass my current lived experiences as a PhD student, which briefly can be described as transient and ever-growing.

After drifting across many areas of the mind, I have settled on asking questions about the nature of intelligence and its measurement, and hopefully answering them, for my PhD. Apart from that, I ponder about the nature of desire and its dynamics over one's life span, and the behavioral patterns of rule-following and rule-breaking, and their underlying psychological and experiential aspects.

For my Ph.D., I am working on human decision-making, particularly formation, mental representation, reversals of preferences, and the role of attention in the phenomena in domains including and beyond consumer choice. I use behavioural experiments and Bayesian modelling approaches to decipher the cognitive mechanisms involved in decision-making. I spend my leisure time reading Indian philosophies.

I like procrastination, games and iced coffee. Made two of them my research topic.

I am interested in studying anxiety and decision-making, particularly how the stochastic nature of self-identification impacts an individual's anxiety levels in various environmental stimuli.
When I'm not in the lab, you can find me around the campus hunting flowers or stalking cats. And even though I have lots of hobbies, I usually end up enjoying a good nap or naming my plushies—because, let's be real, I'm literally just a girl.

I have always been interested in human behaviour and thought biology would be the most direct path to understanding it. Turns out, I hate molecular bio methods. So, here I am, dabbling my hands in cognitive science. Currently, I am working with Hari on a qualitative study exploring Doom loop behaviour among gamers.