About

Rahul Bhui is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management and affiliate faculty of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. His research combines cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and behavioral economics to reveal the deep unifying principles that capture both rationality and irrationality. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Management Science, Nature Human Behaviour, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science, and has been featured in media outlets including USA Today, the LA Times, and Scientific American. Bhui has received several awards, including the Early Career Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics and the Vernon L. Smith Excellence Award from the Society for Experimental Finance. He was also named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science and one of the Best 40-Under-40 Business School Professors by Poets&Quants. Prior to joining MIT, he was a Mind Brain Behavior Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. He holds a BA (Honours) in economics from the University of British Columbia, an MS in behavioral and social neuroscience, and a PhD in computation and neural systems from Caltech.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Social psychology
• Microeconomics
• Mathematics
• Management science
• Management
• Engineering
• Cognitive science
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• The roots of rationality

  PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-11

  preprintOpen access

  Functional accounts of mind, brain, and behavior have profoundly shaped thinking across many disciplines. Despite this common lens, the processes driving adaptive outcomes are often studied in isolation, leading to narrow and localized explanations. This paper brings together perspectives across fields by identifying six dynamics that enable agents to behave adaptively. These dynamics span multiple timescales and systems, including individual-level processes—thinking, learning, and development—and population-level processes—market selection, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution. We examine the reasons behind functional explanations of cognition and behavior, the conditions that foster rationality, and the interactions between adaptive processes. Our goal is to bring the cognitive, social, biological, and computer sciences into closer conversation by exposing researchers to a wide range of perspectives on adaptive decision-making.

  Publisher

• Ambiguity and confirmatory reward learning

  2026-02-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We tend to interpret feedback in ways that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Such confirmatory tendencies are often viewed as cognitive flaws, but might have adaptive facets. We propose a novel experimental paradigm and Bayesian computational model to examine how confirmatory inference shapes reward learning when outcomes have ambiguous valence. In these cases, interpretation involves integrating prior beliefs with incomplete evidence, reflecting an inductive bias analogous to missing data imputation. We develop and test this theory using a reward learning task in which information about outcome valence (but not magnitude) is sometimes withheld, allowing for subjective interpretation. Our Bayesian model explains the dynamics of behavior and stated beliefs better than alternative reinforcement learning models. Moreover, stated beliefs about the positivity of ambiguous outcomes are correlated with optimism. Together, these findings demonstrate how confirmatory reward learning can emerge from inference under ambiguity, and may be individually linked to broader dispositional traits.

  PublisherDOI

• The roots of rationality

  2026-04-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Functional accounts of mind, brain, and behavior have profoundly shaped thinking across many disciplines. Despite this common lens, the processes driving adaptive outcomes are often studied in isolation, leading to narrow and localized explanations. This paper brings together perspectives across fields by identifying six dynamics that enable agents to behave adaptively. These dynamics span multiple timescales and systems, including individual-level processes—thinking, learning, and development—and population-level processes—market selection, cultural evolution, and genetic evolution. We examine the reasons behind functional explanations of cognition and behavior, the conditions that foster rationality, and the interactions between adaptive processes. Our goal is to bring the cognitive, social, biological, and computer sciences into closer conversation by exposing researchers to a wide range of perspectives on adaptive decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• Mental Models of Causal Structure in Economics and Psychology

  ArXiv.org · 2026-03-30

  articleOpen access

  A burgeoning literature in economics studies how people form beliefs about the causal structures linking economic variables, and what happens when those beliefs are mistaken. We survey this research and connect it to a rich literature in cognitive science. After providing an accessible introduction to causal Directed Acyclic Graphs, the dominant modeling approach, we review theory and evidence addressing three nested questions: how individuals reason within a fully parameterized causal structure, how they estimate its parameters, and how they learn such structures to begin with. We then discuss methodological challenges and review applications in microeconomics, macroeconomics, political economy, and business.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Mental Models of Causal Structure in Economics and Psychology

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2026-03-30

  preprintOpen access

  A burgeoning literature in economics studies how people form beliefs about the causal structures linking economic variables, and what happens when those beliefs are mistaken. We survey this research and connect it to a rich literature in cognitive science. After providing an accessible introduction to causal Directed Acyclic Graphs, the dominant modeling approach, we review theory and evidence addressing three nested questions: how individuals reason within a fully parameterized causal structure, how they estimate its parameters, and how they learn such structures to begin with. We then discuss methodological challenges and review applications in microeconomics, macroeconomics, political economy, and business.

  PublisherDOI

• Public communication about science in 68 countries: Global evidence on how people encounter information about science and engage with it

  2025-02-21

  preprintOpen access

  This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies cross-country differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas low education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-01-20 · 208 citations

  articleOpen access

  Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns with a preregistered 68-country survey of 71,922 respondents and found that in most countries, most people trust scientists and agree that scientists should engage more in society and policymaking. We found variations between and within countries, which we explain with individual- and country-level variables, including political orientation. While there is no widespread lack of trust in scientists, we cannot discount the concern that lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority may affect considerations of scientific evidence in policymaking. These findings have implications for scientists and policymakers seeking to maintain and increase trust in scientists.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replicability and generalizability of the repeated exposure effect on moral condemnation of fake news

  Nature Communications · 2025-08-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Repeated exposure to misinformation reduces moral condemnation of those falsehoods, as shown by Effron & Raj (2020)1—and moral condemnation may play an important role in stopping the spread of online misinformation. In this registered report, we conceptually replicate previous findings on the effect of repetition and moral condemnation and investigate the generalizability of the findings, using an updated and larger set of false headlines. We also investigate whether asking for accuracy evaluations of the headlines, a type of accuracy prompt that is standard in repeated exposure tasks, alters the effect of repetition on moral condemnation, as inattention to the veracity of headlines may decrease outrage and thus moral condemnation. We find a clear conceptual replication of the negative effect of repetition on moral condemnation, and insufficient evidence for a relationship between accuracy prompts and the effect of repetition. Repeated exposure to misinformation reduces moral condemnation of sharing those falsehoods online. Here, the authors show that this finding replicates and generalizes to new settings and headlines.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Not So Illusory Truth Effect: A Rational Foundation for Repetition Effects

  2025-01-30

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  The illusory truth effect - the finding that repeated statements are believed more - is understood as a cognitive bias at the core of the psychology of beliefs. Here, we argue that the effect, rather than representing a flaw in human cognition, is a rational adaptation to generally high-quality information environments. Using a formal model, we show that increasing belief in repeated statements improves belief accuracy when a source is credible (i.e., likely to tell the truth) but sometimes makes errors. The theory unifies four key findings in the literature while predicting a testable edge case for the illusory truth effect: when a source is likely to convey falsehoods. Using a large (N = 4,947) pre-registered online experiment, we show that the illusory truth effect is substantially smaller in a low-quality (mostly false) relative to a high-quality (mostly true) information environment. In fact, a majority of participants in the low-quality condition do not demonstrate any illusory truth effect. We identify the deployment of an alternative strategy in the low-quality condition where participants decrease their belief given repetition. Three process-level indicators - response times, cognitive reflection, and the prior plausibility of items - confirm a rational interpretation that is implemented via adaptive intuitions rather than a controlled process. In sum, we suggest the illusory truth effect may not be purely illusory, highlighting its adaptive foundations and the ability of people to efficiently navigate complex environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Public Communication about Science in 68 Countries: Global Evidence on How People Encounter and Engage with Information about Science

  Science Communication · 2025-10-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  This 68-country survey ( n = 71,922) examines science information diets and communication behavior, identifies cross-country differences, and tests how such differences are associated with sociopolitical and economic conditions. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most countries, except those with democratic-corporatist media systems where news media tend to be used more widely. People in collectivist societies are less outspoken about science in daily life, whereas lower education is associated with higher outspokenness. Limited access to digital media is correlated with participation in public protests on science matters. We discuss implications for future research, policy, and practice.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Samuel J. Gershman

  Harvard University

  29 shared

• Reed Orchinik

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  10 shared

• David G. Rand

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  9 shared

• Elliot A. Ludvig

  University of Warwick

  7 shared

• Bradley C. Love

  University College London

  6 shared

• Michael Hattersley

  6 shared

• Roey Schurr

  Harvard University

  5 shared

• Eric Schulz

  Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

  5 shared

Education

• Computation and Neural Systems

  Caltech

Awards & honors

• Early Career Award from the Society for NeuroEconomics (2024…
• Vernon L. Smith Excellence Award in Experimental Finance fro…
• APS Rising Star (2022)