A Cognitive View of Policing: Leveraging Behavioral Science to Improve Officer Training (Oeindrila Dube)

What if the key to police reform isn't changing policies or removing "bad actors," but understanding how good officers make decisions under pressure? Professor Dube argues that prevailing approaches to police reform overlook a fundamental reality: officers must make decisions under intense stress and time pressure—cognitive conditions that lead even well-intentioned officers to rely on mental shortcuts and default assumptions. Drawing on insights from behavioral economics, Professor Dube designed a new training approach that addresses these cognitive realities. Through a sustained partnership with the Chicago Police Department, she tested whether changing how officers think could transform how they act. This seminar will present the results from this collaboration, demonstrating how behavioral science offers a promising new pathway for police reform that works with, rather than against, human psychology. Rectangle: Rounded Corners: Register About the Speaker Oeindrila Dube studies poverty, violence and crime in countries around the world. She uses both quasi-experimental and experimental research designs, and draws on a wide variety of sources, including original surveys, hand collected records, and big data to study these questions. Dube is the Philip K. Pearson Professor at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR) and an affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. She co-leads the Crime and Violence Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and the Socio-economic Inequalities Initiative at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute. About the Lecture Series For more than 100 years, the Social Science Research Council has mobilized policy-relevant social and behavioral science aimed at finding actionable solutions to pressing societal challenges. The Council’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences is a network of research institutions that support our work to foster innovative and solutions-oriented social and behavioral science. In this virtual lecture series, faculty from College and University Fund member institutions share their work to understand how to pursue research that delivers on government innovation.