Andrew Stier

Biography

Why does it feel different to live in a large city versus a small one? Scholars across disciplines point to cognitive overload, inequality, and density — but there is little empirical psychological evidence for these claims. Understanding how physical and social environments influence how we interact with each other, how we make decisions, and whether we find happiness and meaning is critical if we hope to design organizations, neighborhoods, and societies that facilitate better lives. Andrew Stier's research works towards these goals by integrating methods from computational cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and complex systems to understand the interactive feedback between individual minds and environmental context. 

Specific research threads include: (1) measuring the cognitive and behavioral signatures of urban environments; (2) understanding the feedback loops between individual minds and collective behavior; (3) mathematical modeling of how environmental constraints shape cultural affordances. Stier's long-term research goal is to reintegrate explicit models of complex environments into psychological science — an open challenge since Lewin popularized the idea that behavior is a function of interdependent person and environmental factors. Stier's research aims to lead to a relationship between psychology and the social engineering of organizations, cities, and societies similar to the relationship between physics and the engineering of skyscrapers, airplanes, and bridges. 

Stier’s research has been published in impactful journals, including, PNAS, Nature Communications, npj Complexity, and Network Neuroscience. His research has also been featured in the media, including the Times of London and Bloomberg.

Before joining Booth, Stier was an Omidyar and Emerging Political Economies postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and completed a PhD in Integrative Neuroscience in the psychology department at the University of ºÚÁÏ´«ËÍÃÅ.

Academic Areas

• Behavioral Science