DYLAN EVANS: CURRENT INTERESTS

My current research focuses on risk intelligence and decision making:

RISK INTELLIGENCE: I think there is a special-purpose mental ability for thinking about risk and uncertainty, which I'm calling "risk intelligence". At the core of risk intelligence is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately. I have set up a website for measuring risk intelligence - www.projectionpoint.com

Expert gamblers have unusually high levels of risk intellilgence. For the past year and a half, I have been conducting interviews with some of the most successful gamblers in the world to learn more about the way they think about risk. I presented my initial findings at the Fourteenth International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, in May 2009. I give a brief summary of this paper in a short video on YouTube.

I am also a member of the new joint research project in risk management analytics involving University College Cork and IBM. The project will develop enhanced methods and tools to help the manufacturing industry, healthcare organisations, and government agencies manage risk more effectively.

DECISION MAKING: In 2008 I set up the Health Decision Making Research Group (HDMRG) in the School of Medicine at University College Cork to foster interdsciplinary collaborative research on decision making in health contexts. In 2009 the HDMRG launched an ambitious programme of research entitled Future Medical Decisions. I am particularly interested in the application of expected utility theory to medical decision making.

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My previous research has ranged from prediction markets, emotion and evolutionary psychology to robotics and global catastrophic risk:

PREDICTION MARKETS: In 2008 I teamed up with Intrade, the world's leading prediction market company, to investigate possible uses of these markets to forecast key indicators of public health in Ireland. This project was funded by an Innovation Partnerships Feasibility Study Award from Enterprise Ireland. This work has been featured in the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner and on the BBC World Service (to listen, click here) and on RTE Radio 1 (to listen, click here).

EMOTION: In my PhD thesis, and in my first post-doc at King's College London, I explored the psychological literature that investigates the way in which emotions help and hinder the decision-making process. In particular, I developed a view of emotions as heuristics that constrain the possible range of outcomes considered during the decision-making process. In other words, emotions may serve to render salient only a tiny proportion of the available alternatives and of the conceivably relevant facts. Thus they winnow down to manageable size the number of considerations relevant to deliberation. This theory fits well with the concept of emotional intelligence. However, recently I have become more sceptical of the concept of emotional intelligence, for reasons that I explain in this video clip.

I later went on to write computer models which attempted to expand the rational-choice theory of decision-making by including elements of real human decision-making, such as motivational bias. For example, during my second post-doc, at the University of Bath, I constructed a multi-agent based model in which agents that incorporated emotional factors into their decision-making processes outperformed those that did not.

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: I am fascinated by the process of natural selection, and especially the light that Darwin's theory can throw on the workings of the human mind. I have written introductions to evolution and to evolutionary psychology, and am interested in the possibility of testing evolutionary psychology hypotheses by computer simulations - a research program I call "synthetic evolutionary psychology".

ROBOTICS: During my tenure as Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the University of the West of England, I developed artificial models of emotion and conducted research on human-robot interaction. The models of emotion were intended to help robots make decisions in ways similar to those employed by humans.

GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISK: In 2006-7 I led an innovative research project investigating the possibility that global civilisation may collapse within the new few decades. To discover what life might be life in the aftermath of global collapse, I set up a simulation in which volunteers lived as if there had been a major failure of national infrastructure. I am currently in the process of writing up this research.

This page was last updated: 18 April 2010.