Zoe Rahwan

Zoe Rahwan is a Research Scientist at the Adaptive Rationality research group of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, a position she has held since 2019. Previously, she served as a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School (2017-2019) and Research Associate at the London School of Economics (2015-2018), with earlier experience as Senior Manager in Economic Research at Dubai Financial Services Authority (2008-2015).

Her research spans behavioural science and behavioural economics with concentrated focus on ethical decision-making in AI contexts. She investigates the psychology of honesty, charitable giving, corruption, and deliberate ignorance through field experiments across government, business, and development sectors. Her work includes pioneering serious games like my-goodness.net to study effective altruism obstacles and deep empathy for examining AI-generated disaster imagery's impact on empathy.

Recent publications in Nature and Nature Human Behaviour reveal critical insights at the AI-ethics intersection, including dishonesty in human-AI delegation, honesty oath effectiveness, and large language models' influence on collective intelligence. Her methodology consistently employs large-scale field experiments and computational approaches to analyze human behavior under high-stakes conditions.

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As core member of the Adaptive Rationality research team, she develops innovative experimental tools including mygoodness (studying altruism barriers) and deep empathy (analyzing AI-generated disaster imagery effects). Her work bridges theoretical behavioral research with real-world applications in policy, finance, and humanitarian contexts through government and business field experiments.