Successful decision making in social settings depends on our ability to understand the intentions, emotions, and beliefs of others. The so-called "mirror neuron system" for example allows us to interpret other people’s motor actions and action intentions. Empathy on the other hand allows us to comprehend and share emotions and sensations with others. In contrast, our capacity to have a "Theory of mind" or engage in cognitive perspective taking provides us with the ability to infer mental states such as beliefs or desires of other people. By combining methodologies, we try to understand the various routes of social cognition and how their interaction enables us to understand the minds of other people.

Furthermore, we examine the mechanisms and malleability of social emotions such as our sense of fairness, compassion, revenge and envy by conducting studies using interactive mind paradigms involving two or more people present in the scanner environment typically asked to judge how they or other people feel while experiencing different affective states associated with pain, pleasant and unpleasant touch or taste.

To study our sense of fairness or the basis of social decision making, we typically employ game theoretical paradigms developed in the field of economics, thus creating a close link to the emerging field of neuroeconomics. More specifically, we are interested in understanding the determinants of cooperation and prosocial behavior as well as the breakdown of cooperation and consequently, the emergence of selfish behavior. Interactive multi-computer laboratories at our department as well as our satellite laboratory located in Berlin, and our virtual environments laboratory allow the investigation of simultaneous, real-life, interactions between groups of people.