Speaker: Scott E. Page (University of Michigan, Santa Fe Institute). (website) Title: Organizations and Cultural Coherence Abstract: I construct a mathematical framework to elucidate and analyze the interdependence between structural features of an organization and some of its cultural attributes. By the structure of an organization, I mean whether individual actions are assigned hierarchically, agreed upon through […]
Title: Metawisdom of the Crowd: How Choice Within Aided Decision Making Can Make Crowd Wisdom Robust Abstract: Quality information can improve individual judgments but make group decisions less accurate; if individuals attend to the same information, the predictive diversity that underlies crowd wisdom may be lost. We explore this tension within the context of decision support […]
Title:Robust Persuasive Effect of Political Fact-Checking and Remaining Challenges Abstract:The proliferation of misinformation and the persistent gap in factual information among partisans represent significant concerns in contemporary U.S. politics. Fact-checking, a journalistic intervention aimed at verifying the accuracy of claims and information, is seen as a key strategy to address this issue. While early studies suggested a […]
Title: Understanding Online Discourse through Social Context and Structured Pragmatics Abstract: In an increasingly online world, understanding discourse on social media is akin to understanding our society. However, when it comes to social media discourse, a disproportionate amount of focus has been laid on content moderation via hate speech detection. In this talk, I will address […]
Title: Do Funding Communications Increase Election Officials' Willingness to Open More Polling Places? A Field Experiment Abstract: Can encouragement communications cause election officials to open more polling places? Does increasing spending on elections to open more polling places lead to higher voter turnout? Public officials who administer elections make decisions about the operation of elections, and these […]
Title: Putting the Environment Back in Person-Environment Fit Abstract: Psychology scientists have recognized for decades that individual behavior is a function of both the person and the environment. However, due to a dominant focus on individual differences, psychological data on intergroup bias have historically been collected through small, controlled experiments with the individual as the unit […]
Gendered Cognition: The Primacy of Gender in Seeing Human What does it mean to be (seen as) human? In this talk, I explore this question and show that the attribution of gender is a critical component of seeing someone—or something—as human. Given gender’s primacy in social cognition, I propose that gender is linked to “seeing human” in a way that cannot […]
Abstract: Repression research examines the causes and consequences of actions or policies that are meant to, or actually do, raise the costs of activism, protest, and/or social movement activity. The rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital […]
Jennifer Whitson UCLA Anderson School of Management Title: Conspiracy Theories and the Search for Structure Abstract: Conspiracy theories cast disparate or unrelated entities as engaging in concerted, malevolent action. In this talk, I explore antecedents and consequences of beliefs in conspiracy theories. I first present evidence that individual characteristics (i.e., regulatory focus, political identity) and aspects about […]
