David Levari is the Lawrence A. Rand and Tiina Smith Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences and Entrepreneurship. His research tries to understand when help is unhelpful – how people try to assess and improve the performance of themselves and others, and why those efforts often go astray. He uses behavioral laboratory experiments, field studies, and formal computational models to study questions such as why people often take over tasks when they shouldn’t, why top performers don’t always give better advice, and why performance evaluations can get less accurate as poor performance becomes rare. Before coming to Brown, he received his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Business School.