The ability to read the mind of criminals for sure sounds exciting. However, as exciting as it may sound, assessing anyone’s decision-making processes is not the most straightforward task. This post will give a brief overview of the behavioral economics, psychology, and criminology literature on offenders’ decision-making. It will be discussed whether actions of crime can be considered rational and whether social influence plays a role in criminal behavior.

The post aims to give a brief review of psychopathy as a neuropsychiatric disorder. It starts with a discussion of features that define the psychopath. Then it takes a closer look at some of the traits, such as empathy, to show the general beliefs and controversy across the studies with the provided overview of the dysfunctions in the brain and impairments that stem from them. Lastly, the post includes an overview of research on “successful” and “unsuccessful” psychopaths and assesses the literature-based opinion on whether psychopathy can be treated.

How to fit reinforcement learning models to behavioral data using Bayesian inference. This part is focused on the hierarchical Bayesian modeling and particularly on the usage of hBayesDM package. Approaches for the model diagnostic, selection, validation are discussed. The post also goes over groups comparison using posterior distributions of model parameters. Additionally, a brief results comparison between Bayesian inference and Maximum Likelihood Estimation is provided.

How to fit reinforcement learning models to behavioral data using Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). The main goal is to show how to answer research questions using modeling. Post goes over important steps of modeling, such as model selection, model validation, and data generation.