Joe Kable

Joe Kable is the Baird Term Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of MindCORE, Penn's hub for the integrative study of the mind. He is interested in understanding how people make decisions, and in tracing out the underlying psychological and neural mechanisms of choice. Research in his lab employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on methods and ideas from social and cognitive neuroscience, experimental economics, and personality psychology. He has used fMRI to show how the subjective value people place on immediate and delayed rewards is represented in a common neural currency. Some broad questions motivating current research include: How seriously do people’s choices deviate from rational choice theory, and what do the neural value signals in such situations help explain about these deviations? How does decision making differ across individuals, and what are the sources -- psychological, genetic, neural -- of such individual differences? He holds a B.S. in chemistry from Emory University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania.