CPCM Lab

Understanding Human Behaviour through Experiments, Data, and Computational Methods

About the Lab

The Computational Psychology and Computational Methods Lab (CPCM Lab) focuses on the use of computational approaches to study the human mind and behaviour.

Our work is cross-disciplinary and seeks to answer two questions:

  1. How can computational methods enhance our understanding of the human mind and behaviour?
  2. How can psychological research methods inform our understanding of computational model behaviour?

We collect data in psychological experiments and develop and apply techniques from natural language processing, machine learning, and statistical modelling to better understand human behaviour and psychological processes.

Our team brings together researchers with backgrounds in Psychology, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Mathematics, Law, and Cognitive Science.

People

  • Bennett Kleinberg — Associate Professor

  • Riccardo Loconte - Doctoral researcher: Computational advances in verbal deception detection

  • Sanne Peereboom - Doctoral researcher: Assessing the artificial mind through the marriage of natural language processing and psychometrics

  • John Caffier - Doctoral researcher: Computational methods to measure and manipulate trust with hyperpersonalised messaging

  • Weng Lam Ao - Doctoral researcher: Understanding decision-making in transport behaviour through social media data

  • Rasoul Norouzi Nikjeh - Doctoral researcher: Text-mining methods for theory development in psychological and social science research

  • Jennifer Chen - Doctoral researcher: Adolescent-Specific Assessment and Psychotherapy (ASAP): Innovating Idiographic Methods for Youth-Tailored Care

  • Tijn van Hoesel - Doctoral researcher: Investigating the impact of spin and other reporting practices in scientific research

  • Jari Zegers - Research assistant

  • Stefana Vida - Research assistant

  • Jonas Festor - Research assistant

  • Ivo Snels - Research assistant

  • Lucca Pfründer - Research assistant

Research

The CPCM Lab investigates how computational methods can enhance our understanding of the human mind and behaviour, and how psychological research can inform our understanding of computational models.

Research Themes

Deception Detection

  • Integrating experimental data and computational methods to address the “hard problems” of deception research
  • Examining how human adversarial machine learning can inform cognitive deception theory

Methodological advancements

Developing the methods needed to advance computational psychology research

  • Secure and scalable methods for text anonymisation (e.g., Textwash)
  • Sample size estimation algorithms for supervised machine learning

Machine Beahviour

  • Understanding stochastic humanness of large language models through experimental research
  • Using formal psychometric modelling to study the behaviour of artificial intelligence models and how it reflects or diverges from human behaviour and cognition.

Computational Psychology with Natural Language Processing

Using computational text analysis to study and predict psychological constructs in humans (e.g., cynicism, emotion, deception)

PhD alumni of the lab

  • Dr. Isabelle van der Vegt, Understanding and predicting threats of violence using computational linguistics (supervision with Prof Paul Gill) - completed in 1/2021, positions: Scientific project manager at WODC \(\rightarrow\) Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at Utrecht University, NL.
  • Dr. Felix Soldner, Detecting and mitigating online customer fraud (supervision with Prof Shane Johnson) - completed in 6/2023, positions: postdoc at Leibniz Institute GESIS, Cologne, Germany \(\rightarrow\) Forensic Service consultant at PWC.
  • Dr. Maximilian Mozes, Adversarial perturbations in natural language processing (supervision with Prof Lewis Griffin) - completed in 12/2023, position: Senior Research Scientist and team lead at Cohere AI, London.
  • Dr. Arianna Trozze, New forms of financial crime (supervision with Dr. Toby Davies) - completed: 12/2023, position: Senior Cryptocurrency Intelligence Scientist at Elliptic, London.
  • Dr. Daniel Hammocks, Information prioritisation for horizon scanning using data science techniques (with Prof Kate Bowers) - completed in 5/2025, positions: Senior Data Scientist at the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), London \(\rightarrow\) Principal Data Scientist at MOPAC.

Contact

Computational Psychology and Computational Methods Lab (CPCM Lab)
Dr. Bennett Kleinberg, Department of Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

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