Rate My Professor Matti Vuorre

Matti Vuorre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University, where he has been employed since 2023. Previously, he served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford from 2020 to 2022, and as a Postdoctoral Scientist at Columbia University from 2018 to 2020. Vuorre earned his PhD in 2018, MPhil in 2017, and MA in 2015 from Columbia University, along with a BSc (Hons) in 2013 from Victoria University of Wellington. His research centers on psychological functioning in the context of digital technologies and environments, with a particular emphasis on the roles of video games and other digital media in individuals' well-being. He employs advanced statistical methods on large-scale datasets and designs controlled experiments to investigate cognition, behavior, and well-being both online and offline. Additional interests include metacognition, methodological advancements in psychological sciences, and applied statistics.

In September 2025, Vuorre received a European Research Council Starting Grant for his project 'Testing the Technology Related Attention Decline Hypothesis,' which tests whether engagement with internet technologies contributes to declines in attention abilities, offering insights for educators, designers, and policymakers. His influential publications include 'Perceived value of video games, but not hours played, predicts mental well-being in casual adult Nintendo players' (2025, Royal Society Open Science), 'Affective uplift during video game play: a naturalistic case study' (2024, Games: Research and Practice), 'The smoke-detector principle of pathogen avoidance: a test of how the behavioral immune system gives rise to prejudice' (2025, Evolution and Human Behavior), 'Estimating signal detection models with regression using the brms R package' (2025), and 'Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being' (2022). Vuorre's scholarship has amassed over 3,300 citations on Google Scholar. At Tilburg University, he teaches Consumer Analytics Using Big Data and Research Master: Experimental Research, and supervises bachelor's and master's theses in psychological sciences. His work has been funded by the European Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Huo Family Foundation, Tilburg University, and the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund.