Director
Onurcan Yılmaz
Professor of Psychology, Kadir Has University
Prof. Onurcan Yılmaz is a social psychologist studying how human beings achieve cooperation at scale. His research explores how minds, cultures, and institutions interact to enable cooperation among strangers, sustain moral communities, and shape the belief systems that organize social life.
Integrating insights from social psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, and cultural evolution, he investigates how evolved intuitions, cultural norms, and reflective reasoning jointly influence morality, religion, ideology, conspiracy beliefs, trust, and collective action. His work aims to connect individual psychological processes to broader questions about cultural evolution, institutional development, and the conditions under which societies become more cooperative, inclusive, and resilient.
Prof. Yılmaz has led multiple national and international research projects and has published widely in leading journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Cognition. He serves on the editorial boards of Judgment and Decision Making and Political Psychology.
Through books, public engagement, media appearances, and educational initiatives, he seeks to contribute to a more scientifically informed public discourse on morality, belief systems, cooperation, and social life.
Co-directors
Dr. Burak Doğruyol’s research focuses on moral judgment, political ideology, and cooperation, with a particular emphasis on how cultural and cognitive factors shape moral decision-making. He has published in leading journals including Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, European Journal of Psychological Assessment, and Cognition.
Dr. Ozan İşler specializes in cooperation, social heuristics, and moral decision-making. His research combines behavioral experiments and economic models to explore how social norms and incentives shape cooperative behavior. He is an external fellow of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx), with publications in Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Behavior Research Methods, and Judgment and Decision Making.
