Goal pursuit decisions under environmental and social uncertainty (ARC Discovery Project administered by the University of Western Australia) (2019-2022)

This Project aims to develop an integrative computational model that explains how people prioritise the allocation of resources to different goals in the face of uncertainty. Many goals are pursued in a social context, or with only partial information about the environment in which those goals are pursued. Current theories have no mechanism to explain how people make these decisions. A new theory will be tested in a series of experiments in which participants pursue goals by themselves in unpredictable environments, or in competition against an opponent. The project aims to provide the basic research that is needed to scale up computational models of goal pursuit to complex tasks typical in industrial, organizational, and defence settings.