Lion Schulz Receives Otto Hahn Medal

Award honors contributions to how humans understand their own and other people’s minds

• For outstanding doctoral research: Lion Schulz receives the Max Planck Society's prestigious €7,500 award.
• Uncertainty: How humans and AI decide whether to trust themselves and others
• Misinformation: Understanding how people identify biased or unreliable sources
• Trust, mistrust, and paranoia: Excessive caution can spiral into a breakdown of cooperation.

Understanding how people trust their own judgments and each other is becoming increasingly important in times of rapid technological, political, and societal change. Lion Schulz, of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, has been awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for his outstanding work on trust and mistrust in oneself and others.
Schulz illustrates his research questions with a particular episode from the Cuban Missile Crisis: At its height, a Soviet submarine armed with nuclear torpedoes had entered the US blockade zone around Cuba. After being depth-charged by US forces, the captain believed war had begun and considered launching nuclear weapons. “Living in an uncertain world, we constantly need to reflect upon ourselves and others,” Schulz said. “I studied how humans and machines deal with questions like those on the minds of the Soviet officers: do we know enough to make a decision? Can we trust others? Are they out to get us?”

Pinpointing trust and mistrust computationally

Schulz developed a computational framework for how uncertainty about one’s own judgments shapes information seeking, with surprisingly complex implications for how decision-makers should gather and use new information. Expanding his work to social settings, Schulz addressed the question of how we determine which sources to trust: Bombarded with information from different sources, which may be unreliable or biased, he showed how humans can generally learn to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources. Schulz pinpointed this process computationally, revealing where our judgments tend to fail when confronted with biases or too much irrelevant information.
Extending his research to the realm of AI, Schulz also computationally investigated how humans and AI agents can recognize when others are trying to deceive or manipulate them, how they respond with similar tactics, how those tactics can be predicted and responded to in turn, and so forth. Even in seemingly simple settings, Schulz demonstrated that an overly strategic mindset can lead to a complete breakdown of trust and paranoia, resulting in tangible losses for both sides.
“Lion Schulz’s work beautifully links two fields that can benefit from much closer connections: metacognition—the confidence we have in the mental processes in our own minds—and metacontrol, the choices we make under uncertainty,” said Peter Dayan, who supervised Schulz’s doctoral work. “It then extends this same framework to theory of other people’s minds—how we understand others’ thoughts and intentions—in a clear and elegant way.”
Since 1978, the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society is annually awarded to young researchers for outstanding scientific achievements, mostly in connection with their doctorate. It is endowed with 7,500 euros of prize money.