Madeleine Horner

My research interests lie at the intersection of social and cognitive psychology, with a focus on the cognitive mechanisms underlying prosocial behaviour. I explore how people build and use intuitive causal models to predict and explain the prosocial actions of others. Central to this is how people reason about the motivational states that drive prosocial action, such as empathy and the welfare trade-off ratio. I am interested in questions about when and why people perceive others as caring about their welfare, and how that perceived care translates into expectations of helping. To address these questions, I utilise computational modelling, Bayesian inference, and behavioural experiments to uncover the inferential processes that shape how prosocial behaviour is understood.

I completed my undergraduate studies in Psychology, with a minor in the History of Consciousness, at the University of California Santa Cruz. I then went on to complete a MSc in Psychological Research at the University of Edinburgh. I am now undertaking a PhD in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Adam Moore and Tadeg Quillien.

Lab Affiliations: Concepts and Causality Lab, Bramley Computational Cognitive Science Lab, Human Decision Making Lab