Social and Behavioural Factors in Decision Making

Infrastructure is a compound of engineered, organisational, and user subsystems, which is heavily dependent on the behaviour of humans. Although evidence shows that factors such as working context, cultural habits, norms, personality traits, or affective status shape and modulate decision making, our knowledge on how these factors shape decision biases or cognitive failures remains limited.

We extend the study of human behaviour to the specific area of the purchase and consumption behaviour of consumers of energy, including both private households and companies.

While the 'Energy Systems and Comparative Assessment' research cluster approaches the resilience of energy systems from the supply side, the approach of this research cluster is to make energy systems more robust and resilient by dampening demand.

The research modules include:

1. Human Decision Making in Risky, Dynamic, and Complex Environments module will improve the descriptive accuracy of decision-making model more realistically and investigate the impact of design of decision contexts (choice architecture) on resource consumption
2. Making Energy Demand More Sustainable and Resilient module seeks to make energy systems more robust and resilient by dampening consumption, specifially to modulate purchase and consumption behaviour of consumers.