Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Social Science Centers and Shared Resources

Caltech Brain Imaging Center (CBIC) 
Researchers at the CBIC use state of the art MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners to conduct research studies of the brain and its mechanisms.The very ambitious and ultimate mission of the Center is to understand human consciousness.

Caltech Conte Center for Neuroscience 
The Caltech Conte Center for Neuroscience examines four main aspects of social decision making: how basic social rewards are processed in the brain, how these rewards are learned and processed through observation rather than receiving a direct reward, how people process and understand how other individuals feel about rewards, and how the brain regions involved in these experiments are connected on a network level.

California Social Science Experimental Laboratory (CASSEL) 
CASSEL is a joint project of UCLA, Caltech, and the National Science Foundation. Human subjects participate in closely observed experiments to help social scientists better understand decision-making.

USC-Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics (CSLP)
CSLP enables scholars to produce empirical and quantitative analyses of the relationship among voters, democratic institutions, the political process, and law. The Center is a unique network of inter-connected scholars drawn from diverse disciplines such as law, political science, economics, public administration, psychology, and communications who not only seek to explain the process of political preference formation and its effect on political institutions, but also focus on how, if at all, voters might become more knowledgeable about political decisions and issues.

Social and Information Sciences Laboratory (SISL) 
The SISL studies how markets and other social systems function in a world in which economics can no longer be separated from the information and communication systems around us.

Social Science Experimental Laboratory (SSEL) 
The SSEL lab is dedicated to research in experimental economics, finance, psychology, and political science, including experiments on individual decision making, game theory, market and auction design, voting, network formation, and other social phenomena.

Voting Technology Project (VTP)
The Voting Technology Project, a joint research effort by Caltech and MIT researchers, evaluates the reliability and uniformity of U.S. voting systems and proposes specific guidelines and requirements.