| Decision-Making and the Brain 
When the race for the 2016 presidential election unofficially kicked off, no fewer than 25 candidates—six Democrats, 17 Republicans, and a handful of third-party entries—threw their hats in the ring to vie for this nation's top job. That's a lot of choices. Yet, whether the number is 25 or two, how do voters decide which candidate is their candidate?
"The number one, overwhelming factor in voting is partisanship," says Ryan Enos, an associate professor of government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a faculty associate in Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. "People look at the candidates and say, 'I'm a Democrat, I'll vote for the Democrat,' or 'I'm a Republican, I'll vote for the Republican'."
But the neurological processing that goes into making decisions is not that simple.
Read more » | Faculty First Person 
A conversation with
Christopher Harvey, PhD All decisions follow the process of accumulating evidence over time and using that information to make a categorical behavioral decision. If you think about choosing a candidate to vote for, that decision process includes activities like weighing the candidate's policies and viewpoints. In more simple decisions, such as walking down the street, how does your brain use information like street signs, landmarks, and your knowledge about the world to make a decision to turn left or right at an upcoming intersection in order to reach your destination?
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