New Project Support from TÜBİTAK ARDEB 3501!

Our distinct pleasure is to announce that the project, coordinated by Assoc. Prof. Onurcan Yılmaz from the Psychology Department, entitled “How to Promote Cooperation under Resource Scarcity? The Moderating Role of Intuitive/Analytical Thinking”, has been funded by TÜBİTAK 3501 Career Development Program.

Are people more innately selfish or cooperative? This question has come to be studied empirically in recent years with the development of experimental methods. In this regard, the most well-known approach is the “Social Heuristics Hypothesis,” which claims that people intuitively tend to cooperate. An alternative approach, the “Self-Control Hypothesis,” argues that people will behave intuitively selfishly and that a cognitive effort to suppress intuitive reactions is necessary for cooperation. These contrasting findings point to potential regulatory variables that might reconcile the two theoretical approaches. In this project, which will contribute to behavioral sciences, resource scarcity is put forward as a regulatory variable that can reconcile two different theoretical approaches.

Project team:

Assoc. Dr. Onurcan Yılmaz (Project Coordinator): KHAS Department of Psychology faculty member and executive of MINT LAB. Dr. Yılmaz will take an active role in every stage of the project.

Asst. Prof. Sinan Alper (Researcher): Faculty member of the Department of Psychology at Yaşar University. He will actively prepare the scarcity manipulation, analyze the data, and educate the scholars.

Dr. Ozan İşler (Consultant): Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology’s Behavioral Economics, Society and Technology Center (BEST). He is also an External Fellow of the University of Nottingham’s Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx) group. As an expert in behavioral economics, Dr. İşler will take an active role in the correct implementation of the economic games to be used in the project.