Celebrating Five Years of Mindworks

As a behavioral scientist studying social cognition, Nicholas Epley conducts many studies that require two strangers to have a conversation. But those studies are far from simple.

“It’s a hard thing to do out in the world with real people,” says Epley, the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and a Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow. “You need a place with lots of people coming through at once so you can get two random strangers together to talk.”

Mindworks, which celebrated its fifth anniversary in July, has become that place for Epley, as well as a hub for dozens of other Chicago Booth researchers’ work. Operated by the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, for which Epley also serves as faculty director, Mindworks is both a discovery center and lab. Visitors from all over the world can explore behavioral science concepts through free interactive exhibits, then participate in real studies by Booth researchers, earning points that can be redeemed for Mindworks merchandise including sunglasses, hoodies, and books by UChicago faculty.

Nearly 85,000 people have visited Mindworks since it opened in downtown Chicago in July 2021. They’ve come from all 50 states and more than 80 countries. More than 38,000 of those visitors participated in a study, and 219 studies have been completed. Findings from these studies have been published in leading academic journals including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research.

In addition, Mindworks has established itself as an important part of Chicago’s larger cultural community. The center has collaborated with a number of local institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Color Factory Chicago, WBEZ, and, most recently, the Goodman Theatre’s Theater of the Mind—an immersive theatrical experience cocreated by Talking Heads singer David Byrne that’s inspired by neuroscience.

“Mindworks began as a new enterprise integrating behavioral science and lots of other facets: art, design, and hospitality,” says Amy Boonstra, AB ’91, executive director of the Roman Family CDR.

The center celebrated its anniversary with a week of programming from July 22-26, including a double-points day, exclusive prizes, a talk, and even a birthday party complete with cupcakes. It was one of Mindworks’ busiest weeks ever, with more than 650 visitors.

Expanding the Possibilities of Research

An early challenge of Mindworks was illustrating abstract behavioral science concepts in an engaging way. The Roman Family CDR staff worked with the design firm Pentagram to develop exhibits that would be interactive—for instance, showing the overconfidence effect through a display of pegs plotted on a board.

You have to be able to create stuff that people can see without really thinking that hard about it,” he says. “It just has to hit you immediately.”

Those exhibits act as a natural feeder to Mindworks’ studies. “People are learning, and it’s interactive, and they’re energized from it,” Boonstra says. “They say, ‘I want to contribute to behavioral science. How would I do that?’ We can tell them, ‘Well, we’ve got five different studies you can participate in.’”

The studies conducted at Mindworks have varied widely. Some, like Epley’s, only require two strangers to have a conversation, while others involve technology like virtual reality goggles or robots. A common thread is that they need to be conducted in person.

One of Epley’s studies from Mindworks explored the impact of active listening in conversation using pairs of strangers. One participant, the storyteller, was instructed to tell either a boring or an interesting story, while another, the listener, was instructed to either listen as normal or to actively engage through their body language and responses.

“The listeners, when they took an interest in what the person had to say, actually made the boring story every bit as enjoyable as the interesting story,” Epley says. The design was simple, but he says Mindworks made it possible to recruit the pairs of strangers required for the study.