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.