Steven R. Quartz's research uses advances and methods in neuroscience to probe fundamental problems of the mind. This focuses on the brain's value systems and how they interact with culture to create our moral, political, and economic lives. His broader goal is to incorporate these tools into novel approaches to the humanities and social sciences.

Quartz uses advances in neuroscience to understand fundamental questions of the mind. By integrating these advances into a broad interdisciplinary perspective, his goal is to understand how neural systems interact with culture to create our moral, political, and economic lives. For example, he has probed how brain systems that evolved to solve central problems of social life drive contemporary consumer culture. His research uses a variety of techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), computational modeling, and experimental neurobiology. At the lowest levels of decision making, his research has shown that sensory integration—deciding whether visual and auditory information comes from a single source—is statistically optimal from a Bayesian perspective. At the level of social interaction, his research has used a novel fMRI approach called hyperscanning, in which several people are scanned while interacting in real time, to study the neural correlates of trust, strategic choice, and how social influences profoundly affect the expression of

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