Dr Marwa El ZeinSir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral FellowCrowd Cognition Group |
Current Research and Interests
I am a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. My research investigates how and why humans engage in collective decisions and aims to characterize the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying collective decisions. I test the idea that humans join groups to share responsibility for decision outcomes, thereby minimizing regret, punishment and stress in negative circumstances. More generally, I am fascinated by social cognition and the neural basis of social behaviour. My PhD work investigated how perceptual decisions about facial expressions of emotion are shaped by contextual social information. As a post-doctoral fellow, I turned to another type of social decisions, group decisions. On the long-term, my research aim is to reach a good understanding of social behaviours and their underlying neural mechanisms from the very perception of social others to complex group decision-making to important societal domains including political and medical decision-making.