SBSI Colloquia
Brown Bag and External Speaker ScheduleBeginning with the Fall 2020 semester and moving forward until further notice, all colloquium will be held remotely.
Welcome to the Colloquia Tab! Here, you can find information concerning all past and upcoming Brown Bags. Talks are organized by semester and further by month. You can see the date and time of a talk, the affiliation of the speaker, and the title and abstract of the talk in the tables below. If a talk was recorded, a link to the recording can be found under the date of the talk.
Spring 2021 Colloquia
January 2021 - Jackson, Hare
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
January 20, 2021 12:00-1:15pm Presentation Recording |
Joshua Conrad Jackson PhD Candidate University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
The Cultural Evolution of Moral Cognition
Humans constantly infer the morality of those around us, and we use these inferences when we decide whether others are cooperative and trustworthy. Existing data show that inferences of moral character are surprisingly one-dimensional. For example, we assume that good caregivers should also be generous with money, even though caregiving ability and generosity only correlate moderately. Here I lay out a new research program exploring whether these one-dimensional perceptions of morality generalize across cultures and history. Using a cultural evolutionary model of partner choice, I suggest that moral cognition becomes increasingly one-dimensional as societies grow larger and information about interaction partners becomes harder to access and remember. Preliminary computational and survey data support this model, and I outline future behavioral and linguistic studies to build on this early evidence. Our views of moral character may have fundamentally changed across human history, with implications for religion, politics, and group-based conflict.
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**Cancelled** January 27, 2021 |
**Cancelled** Brian Hare |
Survival of the Friendliest: Convergence in dog, bonobo and human mind I will present the self-domestication hypothesis for cognitive evolution by examining convergence between dog, bonobo and human psychology, morphology, development and more. Studies of domesticated animals – and in particular dogs – have shown that selection against aggression leads to evolution in social problem solving skills. Comparisons of bonobos to chimpanzees show that bonobos evolved as a result of self-domestication that similarly shaped bonobo social cognition through selection against aggression. These nonhuman comparisons point to the possibility that humans are also self-domesticated. I present the first tests of this hypothesis that reveal the centrality of evolution in our cognitive development. I conclude we are apes that became human by evolving dog-like social psychology. |
February 2021 - Helion, Dehghani, Gantman, Amir
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
February 3, 2021 |
Chelsea Helion |
Exercising self-control in moral contexts Whether it is going to the gym or sticking to that diet, individuals often struggle to meet their goals. This is often due to the difficulty of prioritizing long-term goals over short-term temptations. We posit that everyday moral decision-making functions in much the same way — acting morally often involves a struggle between two opposing forces: a pull toward doing the right thing and a pull toward doing the wrong thing. Across five studies, we examine the relationship between moral values and self-control, finding that individuals underestimate how much regulatory effort moral action requires, that they make more optimistic moral predictions for the self than they do for their peers, and that moralizing a self-control domain (e.g., dieting) may facilitate goal pursuit. These findings suggest a complex relationship between moral values and self-control – individuals underestimate how much self-control acting morally requires, but can also benefit by moralizing self-control domains. |
February 10, 2021 |
Morteza Dehghani |
Bound in Hatred: Investigating the role of group-based morality in acts of hate Acts of hate have been used to silence, terrorize, and erase marginalized social groups throughout history. In this work, we investigate the motivations underlying extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice. Specifically, we propose acts of hate may often be best understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations. As evidence, we report six studies that integrate natural language processing, spatial modeling, and experimental methods to investigate the relationship between moral values and acts of hate. Our results suggest that moral values oriented around group preservation are disproportionately evoked in hate speech, predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups, and associated with the belief that acts of hate against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-oriented moral values and hate acts against outgroups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong. |
February 17, 2021 |
Ana Gantman |
Doesn’t everybody jaywalk? On rules that are seldom followed and selectively enforced We propose the existence of a subclass of explicitly codified rules—phantom rules—whose violations are frequent, and whose apparent punishability is malleable (e.g., jaywalking). For example, people invoke phantom rules as means to punish others when a pre-existing motivation to punish them (e.g., for a different violation) is active. Across five experiments, (N = 855) we provide evidence for the existence of phantom rules and their motivated enforcement. In Experiments 1, 2a and 2b, participants recognized phantom rule violations as illegal, frequent, and differentiable from violations of both social norms and more prototypical laws. Next, we found that people judge phantom rule violations to be more punishable and legitimate when the phantom rule violator has also violated a social norm (vs. phantom rule alone; Experiment 3)—unless the motivation to punish them has been satiated some other way (Experiment 4). Phantom rules—seldom followed, selectively punished rules—highlight a tension between individual-level moral psychology and systems designed to uniformly enforce rules (i.e., bureaucracies). Implications for examining bureaucratic systems to better understand moral psychology will be discussed. |
February 24, 2021 |
Dorsa Amir |
The Development of Decision-Making Across Diverse Cultural Contexts The human behavioral repertoire is uniquely diverse, with an unmatched flexibility that has allowed our species to flourish in every ecology on the planet. Despite its importance, the roots of this behavioral diversity — and how it manifests across development and contexts — remain largely unexplored. I argue that a full account of human behavior requires a cross-cultural, developmental approach that systematically examines how environmental variability shapes behavioral processes. In this talk, I use the development of decision-making across diverse contexts as a window into the relationship between the socioecological environment and behavior. First, I present the results of a cross-cultural investigation of risk and time preferences among children in India, Argentina, the United States, and the Ecuadorian Amazon, suggesting that market integration and related socioecological shifts lead to the development of more risk-seeking and future-oriented preferences. Second, I present the early results of a five-culture investigation into the ontogeny of social preferences — namely, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and fairness. Taken together, these studies help elucidate the developmental origins of behavioral diversity across cultural contexts, and underscore the utility of cross-cultural research for explaining human behavior. |
March 2021 - Slepian, Danese, Perry, Thornton
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
March 3, 2021 |
Michael Slepian |
Having and Keeping Secrets Common wisdom suggests that secrecy harms relationships and well-being because active concealment is hard and stressful work. Multiple studies of thousands of participants keeping tens of thousands of secrets reveals otherwise. Examining both the frequency of concealing secrets and the frequency of simply thinking about secrets (outside of concealment contexts) as predictors of well-being reveals that only the frequency of thinking about secrets, not active concealment, predicts lower psychological well-being, with consequences for relationships and health. Motivational and emotional antecedents of thinking about and concealing secrets were also uncovered as well as subsequent attributions that relate to well-being. Whereas instances of concealment can be construed as effective goal pursuit (i.e., successful secret keeping), having secrets intrude upon one’s thoughts is taken as a signal of relational and personal problems, including reduced relationship quality and reduced authenticity. The problem with having secrets is not that we have to hide them, but rather that we have to think about them, and live with them alone in our thoughts without others’ help and perspectives. |
March 17, 2021 |
Giuseppe Danese |
The Tragedy of the Masks: curbing shopping frenzies after a black-swan event The phenomenon of household products disappearing from supermarket shelves has been covered extensively in the press in the last year. After a black swan event, these products can be viewed as a common-pool resource subject to a rule of capture by the first appropriator. Using a sample of US participants, we show that when the participants are informed that a fixed supply of facial masks exists, they often coordinate on an egalitarian allocation of masks. In another study in which it is additionally brought to the participants’ attention that COVID-19 disproportionately affects the 65+ population, younger participants demand significantly fewer masks than 65+ participants. A replication study in the UK finds that younger participants in the UK do not display the restraint of their US counterparts. Participants in the UK demand masks based on the masks’ perceived usefulness and the frequency of mask use in their community. |
March 24, 2021 |
Sylvia Perry |
The implications of recognizing and discussing racial bias With the current talk I will discuss my program of research on racial bias awareness—an individual difference measure meant to assess the extent to which White individuals are aware of and concerned about their own racially biased tendencies toward Black individuals. Specifically, across a series of studies, I will discuss (1) how individual differences in racial bias awareness relate to Whites individuals’ reactions to evidence of personal and others’ racial biases, and (2) how bias awareness relates to individuals’ willingness to discuss race and racism with others. Finally, I will discuss newer work on how bias awareness is associated with White parents’ racial socialization practices and how these practices, and the cues that parents convey during them, might influence White children’s intergroup attitudes. |
March 31, 2021 |
Mark Thornton |
Learning the ABCs of body language from the ground up: Conversational gesture discovery using unsupervised machine learning In everyday social interactions, humans use many channels to communicate. These include not only the words they speak, but also prosody, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. Just as phonemes form the building blocks of spoken language, gestures form the building blocks of body language: particular gestures, or strings of gestures, convey information to our conversational partners. To understand the information exchanged via body language, it follows that we need a complete map of the space of conversational gestures. The work I will present in this talk aims to discover this map from the ground up by applying an unsupervised machine to a large video dataset of unconstrained face-to-face conversations. To this end, I adapt approaches from deep learning and the animal behavior quantification literature. This process yields promising results, which may support efforts to automatically identify gestures, quantify their dynamics, and explore their roles in social interaction. |
April 2021 - Marshall, Houston, Creary, Yudkin
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
April 7, 2021 |
Julia Marshall |
Children’s Punitive Reasoning and Behavior Research has documented that punitive behavior emerges early in development and persists into adulthood even across a variety of cultures. Because of this, punishment is thought to reflect a fundamental component of our moral psychological repertoire. Despite this, we know little about the emergence of this behavior. The present talk presents several studies that examine these questions across a variety of behavioral and cognitive tasks. Specifically, we find that children consider punishment a universal obligation motivated by prosocial concerns, such as deterring antisocial behavior and promoting prosocial behavior. Children’s actual behavior too also coheres with similar principles; they are willing to make personal sacrifices to punish antisocial others (reflecting a sense of obligation), and also are more willing to do so more in contexts that have the potential to promote prosocial behavior. Together, this work speaks to ways in which children learn about an essential social behavior—punishment—early in life and provides a foundation to better understand how cultural and social learning shape our mature sense of punishment in adulthood. |
April 14, 2021 |
Kassidy Houston |
Inferences in conversation: How questions and responses direct goal oriented tasks Understanding language involves a lot of inference below the surface. When people speak, their words rarely have one possible interpretation and instead have multiple, all warranted in different contexts. For example, consider the question: “Do you take credit cards?” This could be either a question through which the speaker is searching for a yes/no answer to what was spoken or an unspoken request for information (“How many credit cards do you take? Which credit cards do you take?”). One question might contain many in an effort to concisely and efficiently complete some joint goal. However, it’s unclear how exactly participants in conversation infer when questions are requests for more information, and what context leads us to conclude the speaker’s meaning draws on the greater context of the conversation, rather than just what was said. What factors influence how an addressee interprets the intention of a question, and how they respond? The context in which a question is posed may allow us to make inferences about how the same questions in different situations lead to different responses.
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April 21, 2021 |
Daniel Yudkin |
Stepping Back to See What Matters: Psychological Distance Reduces Diagnosticity Neglect in Social Comparison Humans have always compared themselves to others to see how well they are faring in the game of life. These comparisons can be a source of great pleasure and anguish. Given the emotional stakes involved, it is vital for people to distinguish comparisons that provide them meaningful (or “diagnostic”) information from those that don’t. Yet all too often people fail to do so–a tendency I call “diagnosticity neglect.” Here I present four experiments showing that psychological distance reduces diagnosticity neglect by helping people take nondiagnostic comparisons less personally. These results have implications for a wide variety of issues ranging from the mental health consequences of social media to promoting more equitable social policies. |
April 28, 2021 |
Stephanie J. Crear |
From downplaying to decrying systemic racism: How leader double consciousness alters the work-race boundary in organizations For some time, organizational scholars have implied that there is a rather firm boundary between work and matters of race in organizations such that organizational leaders and members may prefer to separate race from the workplace. Yet, the actions of corporate CEOs following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 suggests that under certain conditions, leaders may actually feel compelled to alter and loosen the boundaries between work and race in their organizations. To date, neither existing scholarship on work-nonwork boundary management or race in organizations suggests that leaders may be motivated to alter the work-race boundary and, when they are, how that process evolves. Our inductive, longitudinal qualitative study of 13 corporate organizations illustrates the conditions under which perspectives on the work-race boundary shift over a 13-year period (2007-2020). In doing so, we reveal the socio-cultural conditions contributing to leader double consciousness, which can alter the work-race boundary in organizations. |
May 2021 - Dietze
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
May 5, 2021 12:00-1:15pm SBSI Zoom |
Pia Dietze |
TBA TBA |
Fall 2020 Colloquia
September 2020 - Cooney, Kobayashi, Heiphetz
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
September 16, 2020 12:00-1:15pm **This talk was not recorded.** |
Gus Cooney Postdoc, Wharton School University of Pennsylvania |
The Liking Gap and What it Means for Metaperception
I will describe a general research program on “the liking gap” – the finding that when developing new social relationships, people underestimate how much others like them. I will present experimental evidence for the liking gap across a variety of circumstances and discuss a number of moderators such as shyness, self-disclosure, and the extent to which people felt isolated during the pandemic. I will also discuss how the liking gap affects groups and teams working together. Finally, I will present evidence for some of the psychological processes that underlie the liking gap, with theoretical implications for the literature on motivated reasoning and metaperception broadly.
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September 23, 2020 12:00-1:15pm Presentation Recording |
Kenji Kobayashi Postdoc, Kable Lab, Psychology University of Pennsylvania |
The Influence of Person Perception on Social Decision Making and Information Seeking We decide how to interact with others based on how we perceive them. A traditional view posits that person perception is structured along two core dimensions, warmth and competence, which have distinct effects on social decision making (Jenkins et al., 2018), but recent evidence suggests that the warmth dimension contains two dissociable aspects, morality and sociability (Goodwin, 2015). I will present two ongoing studies on how people use information about others to shape perception in service of decision making. First, in a decision context where behavior is influenced by others’ warmth but not competence (Trust game), people are willing to pay more for information that is diagnostic on warmth, irrespective of its diagnosticity on competence. This suggests that people adaptively seek social information based on its benefit for upcoming decisions. Second, among traits associated with warmth, those specifically associated with morality reliably predict behavior across multiple economic games (Trust game and Ultimatum game), demonstrating the importance of morality perception in social decision making. |
September 30, 2020 12:00-1:15pm **This talk was not recorded.** |
Larisa Heiphetz Assistant Professor, Columbia Social and Moral Cognition Lab Columbia University |
Perceived (Im)morality and Identity What makes us who we are? Philosophers have long suggested that it’s our memories — if we remembered our lives differently, our entire sense of self might change. This talk considers the extent to which laypeople’s judgments match philosophical theories and what consequences these judgments hold for social perception. In Part I, I discuss data showing that children and adults perceive moral beliefs to be especially central to identity. This is particularly true of widely shared moral beliefs, which are shared with most other people in one’s culture. In Part II, I ask how children and adults think about the identities of people who have violated widely shared moral norms. Here, findings suggest that laypeople, especially children, attribute such behavior (e.g., contact with the justice system, which is often perceived to reflect a violation of widely shared moral norms) to internal “essences.” Such perceptions lead to more negative responses toward people who are perceived to have committed transgressions. When discussing immorality, emphasizing behaviors (“she did something wrong”) as opposed to internal characteristics (“she is a bad person”) may benefit people who have transgressed — which, at some point, will be all of us. |
October 2020 - Beltrama, Danese, Jenkins, Silver
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
October 7, 2020 12:00-1:15pm Presentation Recording |
Andrea Beltrama |
We’re what we say. From conversation to person perception. Since Grice’s (Grice 1975) foundational work, much research in linguistics and psychology has proceeded under the assumption that conversation is a cooperative enterprise — one in which all interlocutors are working together towards attaining an efficient exchange of information, and expect each other to behave in a way conducive to achieving this goal. An outstanding question, however, concerns how listeners rely on conversational behavior to draw social inferences about the speaker — e.g., to evaluate the interlocutors’ behavior in the conversation, and form impressions about them. To address this issue, I present results from two studies exploring how the social evaluation of a speaker is informed by two core dimensions of cooperative communication: Informativeness — i.e., how much information the speaker conveys in the context; and Relevance — i.e., how related the speaker’s utterances are to the conversation topic. Experiment 1 suggests that the social perception of a speaker in terms of both warmth and competence ( |
October 14, 2020 |
Einav Hart |
The (Better than Expected) Consequences of Asking Sensitive Questions Within a conversation, individuals balance competing objectives, such as the motive to gather information and the motive to create a favorable impression. Across five experimental studies (N=1,427), we demonstrate that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions because they believe that asking sensitive questions will make their conversational partners uncomfortable and cause them to form negative perceptions. We demonstrate that the aversion to asking sensitive questions is often misguided. Question askers systematically overestimate |
October 21, 2020 |
Anna Jenkins |
The uncertain social world and its consequences for decision-making In order to make decisions, people regularly need to fill in gaps in information. This need may particularly characterize the social world, where much of the information relevant to a decision cannot be perceived directly but must instead be inferred from indirect cues to people’s likely intentions, beliefs, and behaviors (does he want to cooperate? what will she think is fair? where will they be if I can’t find them?). What are the various routes through which the mind reduces this uncertainty, and what consequences do they have for behavior? First, I will present evidence that patterns of brain activation typically thought to support domain-specific processes for social cognition may instead be explained by the greater uncertainty associated with the social world. Next, I will discuss two different routes by which uncertainty in the social world may be reduced and some of their consequences for social decision-making. Specifically, I will discuss evidence that differences in people’s spontaneous imagination of the future on behalf of different social counterparts influence their choices on behalf of those individuals and that information about others’ social group membership can disrupt, rather than facilitate, strategic interactions. |
October 28, 2020 |
Ike Silver |
Nudging Donors to Nudge Others: Impact messaging increases willingness to share Whether posting online or speaking face-to-face, people often tell others how and where they spend their money. Such word-of-mouth communication represents a powerful form of social influence, responsible for nearly $10 trillion a year in US consumer spending. Yet when it comes to their charitable donations in particular, people are surprisingly reticent to share. In this presentation, I will explore people’s reluctance to talk about charity and describe a large-scale field experiment (N=80,679) designed to mitigate it. I will argue that, when considering whether to share about the charities they support, people often display influence-neglect. That is, they pay more attention to how the decision to share will impact their reputation than to how sharing might inspire others to join the cause. In line with this account, we find that a simple informational nudge reminding real donors about their ability to influence others increases sharing and downstream recruitment. |
November 2020 - Dahan, Crone
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
November 4, 2020 12:00-1:15pm **This talk was not recorded.** |
Delphine Dahan |
Coordinating Meaning And Understanding as a Collaborative Process People use language to accomplish things together. To succeed, they must continuously coordinate their actions, including what the speaker means when producing their utterance and what their addressee takes them to mean. Coordination is a complex process because there is no systematic relationship between an utterance and what the speaker means by it. How do speakers choose to formulate their intention and how do their addressees succeed in reaching the same construal? According to current theorizing, people engage in some form of social reasoning by modeling each other’s minds and their mutual beliefs, which lead them to formulate and interpret an utterance based on its estimated utility. In this talk, I will claim that coordination in unscripted conversations involves more than social reasoning. It is achieved through an active process where each partner, recognizing uncertainty in modeling the other’s mutual beliefs, seeks or provides evidence of understanding. I will support this claim with data from unscripted conversations of individuals engaged in goal-oriented tasks.
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November 11, 2020 |
Veteran’s Day |
N/A |
November 18, 2020 |
Paul Rozin |
Naming Framing: What’s in a name (in psychology)? A lot This is a very preliminary project in which I examine how naming a finding or idea influences its acceptance and influence on research. Ideally a name is “catchy” and also captures the essence of what is being named. I will primarily use examples from my own research experience, and hope to elicit other examples from my colleagues. |
December 2020 - Tybur
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
December 2, 2020 12:00-1:15pm **This talk was not recorded.** |
Josh Tybur VU University, Amsterdam |
Behavioral-immune tradeoffs: Interpersonal value relaxes social pathogen avoidance While providing myriad benefits, humans’ intense sociality also imposes pathogen costs, with any physical social contact risking infection. To mitigate such costs, people avoid contact with those possessing features that have historically been diagnostic of an increased likelihood of infectiousness, such as rashes and sores. However, many infectious individuals are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic, and hence cannot be identified as posing an increased pathogen threat. How do we minimize social infection risks, when any individual could be unknowingly harboring |
Past SBSI Colloquia Series
Fall 2019 Colloquia
September 2019 - Yudkin
Date |
Speaker |
Title/Abstract |
September 18, 2019 |
Daniel Yudkin |
Flexible Ethics: On the Activation, Transportation, and Misperception of Moral Values |
October 2019 - Nave, Yaden, Mullett, Vazire, Rimeikyte
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
October 2, 2019 12:00-1:15pm Solomon B50 |
Gideon Nave |
We are what we watch: movie’s contents predict the personality of their social media fans |
October 9, 2019 |
David Yaden |
The Psychology of Philosophy |
October 16, 2019 |
Timothy Mullet |
Using health and policing data to predict impulsive and harmful behaviours |
October 25, 2019 |
Simine Vazire |
Do we want to be credible or incredible? |
October 30, 2019 |
Vaida Rimeikyte |
Neural processing of decision costs and aversive events |
November 2019 - Bhatia, Lelkes, Guan
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
November 6, 2019 12:00-1:15pm Solomon B50 |
Nazli Bhatia |
“I was Going to Offer $10,000 but…”: The Effects of Phantom Anchors in Negotiation |
November 13, 2019 |
Yphtach Lelkes |
The structure and (an) origin for political beliefs |
November 20, 2019 |
Kate Guan |
How do we feel when angels turn out to be demons?: The experience and effects of misjudging moral character Abstract |
December 2019 - Richards
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
December 4, 2019 12:00-1:15pm Solomon B50 |
Keana Richards |
Gender, preparation, and competitiveness |
Spring 2020 Colloquia
January 2020 - Skitka, Smith
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
January 22, 2020 |
Linda Skitka |
The Social and Political Implications of Moral Conviction |
January 29, 2020 |
Kristopher Smith |
How exposure to other cultures is changing Hadza cooperation |
February 2020 - Platt, Zhao, Mattan
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
February 5, 2020 12:00-1:15pm Solomon D37 |
Michael Platt |
Climate Change and the Social Brain |
February 12, 2020 |
Joyce Zhao |
Towards a space of behavioral interventions: Insights from the drift diffusion model |
February 19, 2020 |
Bradley Mattan |
A multi-method approach to how perceiver gender shapes status-based evaluations Abstract |
March 2020 - Mollerstrom
Date | Speaker | Title/Abstract |
March 4, 2020 12:00-1:15pm Solomon D37 |
Johanna Mollerstrom |
Can Simple Advice Eliminate the Gender Gap in Willingness to Compete? |