Nicholas John Chater (born 8 May 1965) is an English professor of behavioural sciences at the Warwick Business School in London. He heads the organisation's behavioural science group, the largest of its kind in Europe. Chater's work focuses on rationality and language using a range of theoretical and experimental approaches.
Biography
Early life and education Nick Chater was born on 8 May 1965 and obtained a Master of Arts degree in experimental psychology at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1986, graduating with First-Class honours. He subsequently attained his doctorate degree in cognitive science and psychology from the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh, in 1989.
Career
In 1989, Chater worked as a lecturer in psychology, first at University College London (UCL), then, from 1990 to 1994, at the University of Edinburgh. In 1994, he began lecturing in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford before being named Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick in 1996. In 2005, Chater was also named Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at UCL. Chater's early work, with Mike Oaksford, developed the view that human reasoning can be understood to function as uncertain inference, wherein the normative standard for human performance is probability theory. With respect to this understanding, Chater and Oaksford developed models of the Wason selection task, syllogistic reasoning, and conditional reasoning in which Bayesian inference is argued to be a fundamental principle of cognition. Chater's research has focused on identifying general principles of cognition, including the role of simplicity in cognitive processing. He has applied the mathematical theory of Kolmogorov complexity to problems in cognitive science, arguing for formal connections between Bayesian and simplicity-based explanations of perceptual organisation. Using this approach, Chater has developed models of categorisation with Emmanuel Pothos, and aspects of language acquisition with Anne Hsu. In collaboration with the mathematician Paul Vitányi, Chater has examined learning from positive evidence, addressing questions of inductive inference and language learnability. In judgement and decision-making, Chater is known for the Decision by Sampling model of risky choice, developed with Neil Stewart and Gordon D. A. Brown. This work is based on the idea that human judgement is inherently comparative and lacks absolute internal scales for representing magnitudes. The model proposes that decisions are made by sampling values from the environment or memory and evaluating options by comparison. It accounts for many phenomena previously explained by prospect theory and predicts additional context effects. Chater has also contributed to research on language acquisition, processing, and evolution, through collaborations with Morten H. Christiansen. This work examines constraints on language–brain coevolution and proposes that key properties of language structure and processing arise from general cognitive constraints, including a roughly serial attentional bottleneck. During the Cameron–Clegg coalition, Chater was an advisor to the Behavioural Insights Team (often called 'the Nudge Unit'), a social engineering policy consultancy organisation. Chater presents the massive open online course The Mind Is Flat, based on his 2018 publication of the same name, in which he describes the human mind as a "story-generating machine". He was scientist-in-residence on eight seasons of the BBC Radio 4 series The Human Zoo. Chater is also an advisor to the UK government's Behavioural Insights Team and a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the British Academy.
Books
Awards 1995: British Psychological Society's Spearman Medal, jointly awarded with Mike Oaksford 1997: British Psychological Society's Experimental Psychology Society Prize 2023: David E. Rumelhart Prize
References
