Diving into the way our brains make decisions: A visit to Booth’s Mindworks

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Have you ever taken a moment to think about why you make the choices you do?

Mindworks: The Science of Thinking, the Chicago Booth School of Business’s interactive discovery center and working behavioral science lab in downtown Chicago, gives you a chance to dive into the science of what’s behind your personal decisions and learn more about the inner workings of human behavior.

And as a special offer for the UChicago community (academics, staff, and students), those who visit Mindworks during the month of April and mention "The Citizen" will be entered into a raffle to win dinner at the Exchange and tickets to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Did I mention it’s also fun (and free)?

I made a recent visit to Mindworks—operated by the Center for Decision Research (CDR) at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and located in Michigan Avenue’s historic Railway Exchange Building (224 S. Michigan Ave.)—to check out the space and see what all the fuss was about. What I found was a bright, inviting, colorful space that made me want to dive right into the many interactive, “gamified” exhibits.

I even brought a friend—fellow UChicago staff member and head coach for women’s varsity lacrosse, Kate Robinson—so that we could test our skills in one of Mindworks’s popular exhibits: a take on the 1960s popular game show The Newlywed Game.

Sitting across the table from one another, I played the part of the “responder” (marking down my preferences for how much I enjoy doing different activities) while Kate played the “guesser” (trying to guess my preferences). Kate had to “predict” how many of my preferences she would guess correctly, and then once I answered, we compared our responses to the questions. She did well, hitting 9-of-15 correct answers, but she had predicted she would hit 13—making her a bit overconfident.

The game’s aim is to show us that when we have a strong impression of someone, it’s easy to mistake general intuition for detailed knowledge about their specific beliefs and preferences—which can trick us into thinking we have all the right answers. A couple of takeaways: I don’t really like bowling or watching TV as much as she thought I did, and I learned she isn’t really that into tennis and really dislikes cleaning the house.

Another exhibit, titled “Design Your Best Life,” explained the concept of choice architecture, or the way decisions are designed and presented to us—and how we can harness this knowledge to optimally design our own decision environments. The various ways that choices are presented to us influence our decisions in surprisingly powerful ways and can outweigh our own deeply held beliefs or preferences.

This exhibit prompted me to think about a specific goal that I might want to accomplish (I chose “help others in my community”) identify barriers that might be holding me back from accomplishing it (like “too many distractions”), and then select which “nudge” (as many of you likely know, a concept that comes courtesy of UChicago Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler) would help me overcome said distraction.

Nudges—like making the goal fun, easy, social, timely, or calling more attention to it—can help us change our own behaviors, overcome barriers, and bring our actions more in line with our goals, according the Mindworks explainer. Plus, I got to create my own unique design (see image below) based on my choices in the exhibit to hang on the wall.

That’s what makes Mindworks so cool—it brings groundbreaking behavioral research, like what helped win Thaler the Nobel Prize in 2017—into a digestible, fun format for the public. The space is recommended for adults to kids ages 12+, or around an eighth grade reading level (kids under 16 years old need to bring a parent or legal guardian). Mindworks takes about 30 minutes to an hour to experience.

Beyond the exhibits of established psychological principles, you can also participate in rotating research studies (for ages 18+) that gather data for the PIMCO Decision Research Laboratories at Booth’s CDR. The data collected in the studies help scientists explore new frontiers in the understanding of how people form judgments and make decisions—plus, you earn points that can be used toward swag at Mindworks (Kate and I combined our points to get a branded deck of playing cards and sticky notes!).

Mindworks is an evolution of the research ecosystem that Nicolas Epley, the John Templeton Keller Professor of Behavioral Science at Booth and faculty director of the CDR, is creating at UChicago, including the on-campus PIMCO Decision Laboratories at Booth’s Harper Center, a virtual lab, and various pop-up labs around the city, including at Chicago Park District locations, Union Station, and The Second City, among others.

Epley has always been interested in taking social psychology research out of the University campus and into the world where people are living. Hence, Mindworks.

“Mindworks will be the only hands-on behavioral science lab in the world where you can both study and be studied simultaneously,” Epley said in a release when Mindworks first opened in July 2021, “expanding research beyond the ivory tower, into our everyday lives.”

Nicole Watkins has served as the Manager of Internal Communications & Content at the University of Chicago since January 2020. Prior to that, she spent 12 years working in the sports media field, joining the University in 2017 as the Director of Athletic Communications. Fun fact: she has a bachelor’s degree in fine art—with an emphasis in photography—from Western Michigan University, where she also played Division I college basketball.

She can be reached at newatkins@uchicago.edu.