The Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs are pleased to announce the recipients of two fellowships for graduate work in applied behavioral science.  The 2025-26 recipient of the Hamid Biglari Behavioral Science Fellowship is BSPL member Kristopher Nichols.  

Nicholas was selected by the Center’s fellowship committee from a pool of students nominated by members of the faculty across a number of departments and based on the strength of their academic progress thus far and the anticipated trajectory of their future research. Each fellowship provides financial assistance to students in any discipline who are pursuing study in the area of behavioral science and public policy.

Nichols is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology. His research focuses on social learning as a mechanism for coordination, conformity, and exploration in judgment and decision making. In one line of research that utilizes surveys, text-analysis, and large language models, he and his collaborators examine how the prevalence of normative signals in cable news about democracy shapes second-order beliefs about democratic institutions and processes. Another line of research investigates how social information gleaned from observing others' successes and failures updates individual risk preferences and decision making under uncertainty, with implications for understanding adaptive learning in dynamic environments. He holds a Master’s degree in social sciences with a certificate in computational social sciences from the University of Chicago and a Bachelors in psychology from Stephen F. Austin State University.