Benedek Kurdi, Ph.D.

Benedek Kurdi is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
As an experimental psychologist, Professor Kurdi’s research seeks to understand the immense power and the surprising limitations of our minds in adaptively responding to new information given a lifetime of learning. He examines learning in the context of basic social processes. Specifically, he studies the ordinary decisions we make every day that are critical to our well-being and even survival: our evaluations of and beliefs about other people. In doing so, he relies on a combination of traditional online and laboratory experiments as well as computational approaches, while drawing on a variety of learning paradigms, including reinforcement learning, evaluative conditioning, propositional learning, and causal learning. These methods help him uncover the basic mechanisms involved in how we acquire and update our impressions of individuals, especially against the backdrop of information about their social group memberships, such as gender, sexual orientation, age, race, and ethnicity.
Research Areas:


Social Personality


Research Interests:


Implicit Attitude Change


Attitudes in the Wild


Computational Approaches


Open Science and Resources


Education


B.A., Eotvos Lorand University, 2011


M.A., political science, Central European University, 2013


M.A., psychology, Harvard University, 2019


Ph.D., psychology, Harvard University, 2019