Reasoning and decision making as social activities
Office hours: Wednesday 1.30 - 3.30; Cohen hall 313. I can also take appointments, contact me by email (hugo.mercier "at" gmail.com).
We can’t deny that the social context has an influence on our behavior. The seminar will explore the idea that it has a larger impact than we usually care to admit. More specifically, we will see that abilities that are generally thought of as being very personal, such as reasoning and decision making, are in fact heavily influenced by the social context. To that end, this seminar will review some research in the fields of reasoning and decision making, as well as social psychology.
Click here to view some non technical books that are related to this seminar.
Course requirements
The grade has three components. The first is general participation in class (30%). It also includes short questions and comments to be sent by email about the weekly readings. The second is a presentation: each student will have to present at least one of the articles to be discussed at some point in the semester (10%). The third and most important consists in three papers that can bear on any of the readings / topics to be explored during the class (60%). Each paper should be at least 1500 words long, and they will have to be handed in the week in which the relevant topic is discussed.
01 24 Introduction
The methodology of experimental psychology will be very quickly described. A few core concepts, such as unconscious and modularity will also be introduced.
Slides
Methods
Classic experiments
The cognitive unconscious
Modularity
Principles of evolutionary psychology
01 31 Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychologists are cognitive psychologists who think of human psychology in evolutionary terms. In this class, we will introduce the main concepts of evolutionary psychology that will recur throughout the seminar.
Cosmides & Tooby 1997 Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer
de Waal, F. B. M. (1982). Chimpanzee Politics. New York: Harper & Row.
02 07 Emotions and feelings
Even though we have a strong sense of emotions and feelings as being very private, they often have social causes (someone upsets us) and social consequences (we fight with our friend). In this class the psychology of emotions and feelings will be briefly introduced from an evolutionary perspective. Then we will stress the role of specifically social emotions—from anger to shame—as well as the surprising social aspects of our feelings.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2001). Social functions of emotions. Emotions: Current issues and future directions, 192–213.
Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(4), 332-348.
02 14 Self-control
As its name indicates, self-control is typically thought of as a purely individual mechanism. However, there is also an old strand in psychology that relates self-control to social pressures. In this class we will review evidence showing that indeed our ability to self-control is deeply influenced by our social surroundings.
NOTICE. For the first half of the class, we will listen to a talk by Walter Mischel, one of the most important researchers in the field.
3:30PM in Stiteler Hall room B6. Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in Stiteler Hall's Silverstein Forum
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/node/20877 (for further information)
Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106, 3-19.
02 21 Trust
Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld
Gambetta, D., & others. (1990). Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations: Basil Blackwell New York.
02 28 Cognitive dissonance
Cooper. Fifty years of a classic theory.
Tedeschi et al 1971 Cognitive dissonance Private ratiocination or public spectacle.
03 14 Morality
Our intuitions about what is fair or not are crucial in our dealings with other individuals. In this class, we will try to understand their evolutionary origins and the interplay between these intuitions and moral reasoning.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834.
Greene, J. D. (2007). The secret joke of Kant's soul, in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
03 21 Theory of mind
Theory of mind is the name psychologists give to the cognitive mechanisms that allow us to understand other people. In this class, we will briefly explain how they work and what kind of biases they can lead to.
Nickerson, R. S. (1999). How we know-and sometimes misjudge-what others know: Imputing one's own knowledge to others. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 737–759.
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. Values and knowledge, 103–135.
03 28 Trust and epistemic vigilance
We don’t take what other people tell for granted. On the contrary, we use different mechanisms to evaluate what we should believe, and to tailor our own communication to the circumstances.
Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., et al. (Submitted). Epistemic vigilance.
Harris 2002 Checking our sources the origins of trust in testimony.
04 04 Reasoning
Even though reasoning is usually seen as a purely individual mechanism, I will try to convince you that it is in fact a profoundly social mechanism, shaped by the need to convince other people and only be convinced when it is appropriate.
Mercier, H., Sperber, D. (Submitted) “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory”.
04 11 A social mind
Levinson, S. C.1995. Interactional biases in human thinking. In Social intelligence and interaction, edited by E. Goody, 221-60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kurzban, R., & Aktipis, A. (2007). Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-ish? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 11(2), 131.
04 18 Cross-cultural psychology
Even thought they tend to be understudied in decision making, there are sometimes wide variations in behavior and cognition between cultures. This class will give a brief overview of these differences in the domains reviewed previously, and try to explain their origin.
Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (In press). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Sperber, D., & Hirschfeld, L. A. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(1), 40-46.
04 25 Impression management
We are always striving to look good in other peoples’ eyes. This fundamental drive is essential to our social lives and has a large impact on our decisions.
Miller, Spent