hariharan purohit

hariharan22 at iitk dot ac dot in ▪
twitter ▪ cv ▪ google scholar

I'm a PhD student in The Department of Cognitive Science. I work in the PLATIPUS lab under Dr. Nisheeth Srivastava on computational cognitive science.

I study the experience of quitting and its many forms. Quitting rarely is just a decision, it rather feels more like something that happens to you. Like "a give" in the knees before you have even committed to it. My work begins here, in that first-person character of giving up too early or pushing through when you did not want to. I then ask what it takes to explain this experience formally: just a threshold crossed, an abstract value updation or a cost outweighing one's expectations.

I approach my research through phenomenology rather than away from it. Before I model why people quit too early or persist too long, I try to understand what quitting and persisting feel like from the inside: such as a loss of willpower, the persistent thoughts of quitting and the slippery slope of regret. That grounding shapes the questions I bring to the data: not just when do people quit, but what shifts in subjective experience explain it, and what that reveals about willpower, attention, and inertia as lived states rather than abstract traits. Methodologically, this means I move between different contexts; such as longitudinal studies tracking how quitting preferences evolve over months, within-session studies of runners deciding whether to keep going, and computational models that try to formalize what these decisions have in common. The aim is always the same: to take something as slippery as "I just couldn't keep going" and build a model precise enough to predict it, without losing what made it true in the first place. That combination is what I bring to questions of persistence and quitting wherever they show up: in athletes, in habits, or in how people decide whether to keep working with an imperfect tool.

Before my PhD, I was a masters student in Cognitive Science at University of Allahabad and majored in psychology in my bachelors at University of Mumbai.

Current work

Quitting in Online Chess players

My first project looked at the quitting behavior of online chess players. Using the the open access data from lichess.org, I analyzed chess players' propensity to quit in 'Classical' chess matches. Using a combination of game factors and custom quitting factors, I quantified the quitting behavior of player with a statistical hazard of quitting. I also showed evidence for tilting in chess players, that occurs as a consquence of quitting a chess match. These results were contextualized as repesenting a metacognitive failure of the effort allocation process on the task. A specualtive account of this process is provided in the recent Cognitive Science paper I published (with Nisheeth).

Quitting in Long Distance Runners

My second project looks at process-tracing the thoughts of stopping that long-distance runners experience during a run. In order to accomplish this, I conducted field experiments where long-distance runners ran around a track with a wearbale device at a pre-specified pace catered to each runner's endurance levels. Runners self-reported their stopping thoughts using the device. I study the time series of stopping thoughts in order to explicate how the thoughts impact the runner's decision to completely stop the run. I presented a portion of this work at MathPsych 2026 conference.

Slipping into Inertia

In my third project, I approached quitting decisions through the lens of inertia and titling behavior in video gamers. I collected post session descriptions from gamers across the span of a month. Specifically, I was looking for descriptions where gamers tend to experience inertia i.e. a pull towards persisting in a gaming session, even when they intend to quit. I analyzed these qualitative descriptions through thematic analyses to capture features that are present across gamers. This data is being used to inform better decsriptive models of quitting and also, developing an algroithm that tracks gameplay engagement in order to track "tilting" behavior as a behavioral marker for gaming addiction.

Publications

A Metacognitive Appraisal of Quitting in Chess.
Hariharan Purohit, and Nisheeth Srivastava (2025). Cognitive Science, Vol. 50, 2026

A metacognitive appraisal of quitting.
Hariharan Purohit, and Nisheeth Srivastava (2025). Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Measuring the completeness of race models for perceptual decision-making
Anjali Sifar, Hariharan Purohit, and Nisheeth Srivastava (2023). Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Factors Affecting Academic Achievement in Students: An Empirical Study
Vinita Vader, Hariharan Purohit, and Shreya Pandit (2018). Journal of Educational Planning and Administration.

conference presentations

Autocatalytic thoughts about quitting predicts actual decisions to quit during endurance running
Hariharan Purohit, and Nisheeth Srivastava. Presented at MathPsych / ICCM 2026 held on 17-21 July, Montreal, Canada

A process-tracing account of quitting decisions in naturalistic settings.
Hariharan Purohit, and Nisheeth Srivastava. Presented at workshop on Decision Making and Information Processing in Complex Settings held on 27-28 April 2026, IMT Lucca, Italy

'Sounds like a skill issue': what makes you quit at chess?
Hariharan Purohit, and Nisheeth Srivastava (2024). 11th Annual Conference on Cognitive Science.

Measuring Behavioural Variability in Random Dot Motion Task
Hariharan Purohit, Anjali Sifar, and Nisheeth Srivastava (2022). 9th Annual Conference on Cognitive Science.