Gideon Nave’s educational background is in two sub-fields of electrical engineering: signal processing and machine learning. Both use statistical tools to make inferences and extract signals from noise, such as developing algorithms that recognize speech in a loud, lively cocktail party.

“When I was taking these classes, I realized the brain does something similar,” he says. “Because when we see, when we hear, when we make judgements about future events, we try to extract some signal from noise. That’s what got me interested in the brain.”

Fast forward to Nave’s time at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked while doing his Ph.D. with Professor Colin Camerer, a MacArthur Fellow and behavioral economist, studying the systematic errors that people make, and why they make them.

Now an assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School, one of Nave’s main research topics revolves around figuring out the drivers of decision-making at a biological level.

“Obviously decision-making is important for marketing and understanding consumers,” he says, while chatting in his office at Jon M. Huntsman Hall. “I’m reverse-engineering the mind, which is not a computer, but it does computations, and does it in a way that is predictable to some degree.”

When it comes to decision-making, people come to conclusions based on the context that surrounds them. Things like hunger, sleep deprivation, or stress affect people’s actions.

“With stress, there is a stressor, the stressor leads to several endocrine responses, and as a result, your body and your brain processes information differently,” Nave explains. “I think it’s important for us to know the consequences of stress, especially when we are in a time where humans haven’t adapted to the current demands of the world.”

Last year, Nave and colleagues from Düsseldorf University in Germany published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology their research showing how some people can be prone to make systematic mistakes after receiving a pharmacological treatment of stress hormones. For the study, they looked at the role of two major endocrine stress mediators, cortisol and noradrenaline, in cognitive reasoning. Eighty-three healthy male participants were randomly split into four groups and received either two placebo pills, a placebo and a cortisol pill or noradrenaline pill, or both cortisol and noradrenaline, before taking a Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). The CRT was designed to present situations where there is an intuitive answer that jumps into almost everyone’s mind, but it’s incorrect. To get the right answer, you have to present some sort of doubt, and check yourself.

“These tendencies to check yourself tend to decrease in specific contexts like stress,” Nave says.

The study found that cortisol, which is released in human bodies as a response to stress, impaired participants’ performances in the CRT, and made participants that were affected more likely to give their intuitive, but faulty, response.

“One important point to note about this study is that it uses a manipulation of hormones directly, by giving participants a drug versus placebo,” Nave says. “It’s a manipulation that most people cannot tell which one they received. Rather than stressing people out through some psychological context, it’s quite amazing that we can interrupt this signaling mechanism directly with a drug and have an influence that generates a reliable behavior effect. I find it still surprising and bewildering to some degree that we can influence behavior this way, under the radar of conciousness.”

This is just one of the many studies surrounding decision-making that Nave plans to build more research upon in the coming years. His goal? To use these insights to create a better society.

“This type of research could allow us to know when we are more vulnerable to these types of behaviors, and we can protect people from making errors, perhaps by using policies,” Nave says.

Another topic Nave is working on is increasing the reliability of scientific findings around hormones.

For instance, Nave and colleagues have recently taken a critical look at oxytocin and the belief that it increases trust in humans.

“Oxytocin was an example of a study that had a lot of citations, it was published in Nature 10 years ago, and was extremely influential,” he says. “We just showed that the effect is just, at the best case, not very reliable.”

The idea, Nave says, is to direct the scientific community toward the obvious importance of replicating previous studies in projects in very large-scale ways.

“It used to be that you were considered rude if you did it, but now it’s very clear to people that there’s a need for it,” Nave says.