Benedek’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.
He is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. He obtained his PhD in 2019 at the Harvard Psychology Department under the mentorship of Mahzarin Banaji, Fiery Cushman, and Sam Gershman and completed his postdoctoral training at the Cornell Department of Psychology and the Yale Department of Psychology with Melissa Ferguson and, at Cornell, with Amy Krosch. His research has been funded by the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship, the Harvard Graduate School Fund, the Harvard Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, the Stimson, Restricted, and Knox Funds at the Harvard Psychology Department, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences. His work has been published in American Psychologist, Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nature Reviews Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and numerous other outlets.