As a University of Chicago 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,” said 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 School of Business researchers’ work. Operated in downtown Chicago by the Roman Family Center for Decision Research (CDR), 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.
Nearly 85,000 people have visited Mindworks since it opened in July 2021. They’ve come from all 50 states and more than 80 countries. More than 38,000 of those visitors participated in research, helping to complete 219 studies. 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 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 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.
Mindworks celebrated its anniversary with a week of programming from July 22-26, including a talk, exclusive prizes and even a birthday party complete with cupcakes. It was one of Mindworks’ busiest weeks ever, with more than 650 visitors.
Solving a behavioral science research problem
Most university psychology and behavioral science programs, including Booth’s, have on-campus labs, but subjects for studies primarily tend to be students. So Epley has spent his career trying to figure out how to find subject pools that are more diverse and representative of the country and the world.
“The central challenge for all behavioral scientists doing research is you need people to be in your experiments, and you need a lot of them,” Epley said. “You don’t really want to build a science of human behavior from a few undergrads.”
Around 2007, Epley spearheaded a collaboration with the nearby Griffin Museum of Science and Industry to involve visitors in experiments as an educational experience. Later, Booth also opened a downtown behavioral science lab, in addition to its on-campus one.
The studies at the museum became extremely popular, while the downtown lab, in a high-rise office building, struggled to attract the wider public. That made Epley begin to conceive of Mindworks: a space that could draw participants by offering both the educational engagement of a museum and a convenient downtown location.
Once Epley became faculty director of the Roman Family CDR in 2017, the plan for Mindworks was put into motion.
PIMCO CEO and UChicago trustee Emmanuel Roman, MBA’87, was excited to support the research and offered funding. Then, Epley and Boonstra, who joined the center in 2018, started touring downtown sites and eventually leased their location: a high-traffic storefront on Michigan Avenue across from the Art Institute. Boonstra later contracted award-winning architects Krueck Sexton Partners to bring a unique space to life.
“When you ask the crazy question, ‘Can we do X?’ the answer isn’t always yes, but it’s almost always, ‘Let’s try,’” Epley said. “The notion that you could have a space on Michigan Avenue wouldn’t enter into people’s thoughts at other places. But at Booth, we were willing to ask and were able to find support for it.”
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.
Those exhibits act as a natural feeder to Mindworks’ studies.
“People are learning, and it’s interactive, and they’re energized from it,” Boonstra said. “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 such as 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 said. The design was simple, but he says Mindworks made it possible to recruit the pairs of strangers required for the study.
Ph.D. student Roman Gallardo, AM’26, studies intergroup relations, focusing specifically on stigmatized groups. Before Booth, he’d only conducted studies online, so he was excited when the opportunity came to strengthen his research through Mindworks.
He’s now running a Mindworks study alongside Jane L. Risen, the H. G. B. Alexander Professor of Behavioral Science, on conversations about gender inequality.
“Intergroup inequality a topic that people want to avoid,” Gallardo said. “So I wondered, if people did have these conversations, how would they go? How would they differ depending on the genders of the speakers?”
The study has pairs of strangers discuss gender inequality and analyzes how they felt about the conversation before and after it took place. Gallardo believes conducting the study in-person, and allowing participants to connect face-to-face, is yielding more authentic conversations than having participants converse over a video call.
“I don’t think I would have been able to pursue this research if I didn’t have Mindworks,” Gallardo said. “We really wanted this in-person sample.”
As Mindworks embarks on its next five years, Epley and Boonstra want to continue focusing on engaging with the community and supporting unique research. The past year was the center’s busiest yet, with nearly 20,000 visitors. They’re also retaining repeat participants through Club Mindworks, a free membership program offering enhanced rewards and exclusive events.
They recently tapped into the group to find subjects for a longitudinal study, where participants will need to return to Mindworks twice. They hope to leverage the club for similar studies in the future.
“Five years in, I still feel like we are on the runway and picking up speed,” Epley said.
—This article originally appeared on the Chicago Booth website.