天美传媒

Behavioral Science Workshops

Invited guests, faculty, and students present current research in decision-making and judgment in our workshop series. The emphasis of our workshop series is on behavioral implications of decision and judgment models.

Workshop Details

• Where: Chicago Booth Harper Center, Classroom C03. Workshops will be offered IN-PERSON ONLY.
• When: Mondays 10:10鈥�11:30 a.m. (unless otherwise noted)
• Who can attend: Workshops are open to Roman Family Center faculty, researchers, staff, and students, plus invited guests. Additional requests to attend the workshop are handled on a case-by-case basis. Please email yui.ito@chicagobooth.edu if you鈥檇 like to attend.
• Archive: For a full list of presenters 2004-present, see our workshop archive.

 

Spring Workshop Series 

 

Monday, March 31, 2025

Tessa Charlesworth
Northwestern University

鈥淭racking attitudes and stereotypes across history鈥�

There is an old quote from Mark Twain that 鈥渉istory doesn鈥檛 repeat itself, but it often rhymes.鈥� In this talk, I will review a collection of empirical results showing how this quote rings true when it comes to the long-term patterns of attitudes and stereotypes about social groups. For instance, despite the perception of attitude change in the short-term (e.g., over a few hours or days), the longer-term histories of attitudes can reveal striking persistence. Drawing on big data from millions of respondents collected over 18 years, as well as millions of books and newspapers published over 200 years, I will discuss the moments of persistence and change in social group attitudes and stereotypes. The findings help contextualize ongoing debates about whether, and if so how, it may be possible to durably change our society towards more equity, inclusion, and fairness for all social groups.

Monday, April 7, 2025

Jennifer Trueblood
Indiana University

"Improving Human and Machine Decision-making through Cognitive-Inspired Data Engineering"

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise for complex decision-making tasks, such as interpreting medical images. However, human errors during AI development can introduce biases into models and create misalignment between machines and human users. Despite advances in unsupervised machine learning, most systems still rely on human-labeled data -- a massive industry powered by data annotation companies. These companies often aggregate labels from multiple annotators to improve accuracy, leveraging the 鈥淲isdom of the Crowd.鈥� In this talk, I examine how human annotators systematically show miscalibration and base rate biases. These biases can propagate from individuals to crowds to machine learning models. I鈥檒l present cognitive-inspired data engineering methods that correct for these biases using well-established models of human subjective probability judgment. These approaches can improve model accuracy, calibration, and alignment with expert decision-makers. This work underscores the importance of understanding human cognition and decision-making in the training and development of AI systems.

Monday, April 14, 2025

Ania Jaroszewicz
University of California San Diego

"The Effect of Unrestricted Cash on Lives and Livelihoods: Experimental Evidence from Boston"

Unconditional cash transfers are intended to alleviate basic financial constraints and help low-income individuals improve their well-being. We tested the efficacy of such transfers in a large scale randomized controlled trial of 1,486 households in poverty in the Boston area. We distributed approximately $5 million, randomizing households to either a treatment group that received $9,000 ($500/month for 18 months) or a control group that received $360 ($20/month). We further cross-randomized with a social capital treatment providing tools and encouragement to interact with other study participants. We measured the effects of the treatments repeatedly over the 18 months, focusing on two types of outcomes: 鈥渇irst stage鈥� financial effects (consumption, savings, and debt) and downstream well-being (financial, psychological, health, and family well-being). Analyses reveal that the cash treatment increased consumption and savings. However, we find no positive effects of either financial or social capital on our preregistered well-being outcomes; our estimates rule out even small improvements. Exploratory analyses point to a potential explanation: We find that one-quarter to one-half of cash recipients felt some regret with how they used the funds鈥攑articularly that they had not saved more鈥攁nd a comparable fraction reported that they would have liked more advice or guidance on how to use the funds. We conclude with recommendations for future research and policy.

Monday, April 21, 2025

Mark Thornton 
Dartmouth College

"How people change their minds about people: The bases of naturalistic trait impression updating"

First impressions of other people can have major and lasting consequences. However the process of impression formation does not stop at one's first glance at another person. People can and do change their minds about other people. A nervous job candidate can reveal hidden strengths. A promising first date can be followed by a boorish second. What factors drive us to update our impressions of other people? And what are the neural mechanisms that make these updates possible? In this talk, I will combine naturalistic stimuli, social interaction data, functional neuroimaging, and computational modeling to advance our understanding of trait impression updating. The results I will discuss shed light on multiple determinants of impression updating including the multimodal behavior of the target person; the mood, attitudes, and personality of the perceiver; the social interactions within which people perceive each other; and the neurocompational processes that combine these different sources of information. Together, this research moves the field closer to an understanding of trait impression updating that is precise and mechanistic while simultaneously naturalistic and generalizable.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Mohammad Atari
University of Massachusetts Amherst

"Psychological Change and Kinship Intensity in China over Two Millennia"

A growing body of evidence suggests that important aspects of psychology culturally co-evolve with different institutions and social norms over historical time. Here, using two Chinese corpora, we apply a new computational text-analysis pipeline to capture psychological characteristics across time (770 BCE to 1911 CE) and space (270 prefectures). Our results offer two key insights. First, our psychological measures demonstrate both non-linear temporal dynamics and substantial regional variation, bringing into question any static, linear, or essentialized views of Chinese psychology. Second, to explain historical and regional diversity in psychological traits, we test and find support for the hypothesis that family organizations, captured by kinship intensity, co-evolve with particular aspects of psychology in predictable ways. This project extends efforts to measure psychological attributes from textual sources beyond Western societies (and predominantly English-language data), thus offering an important new test of the cultural evolution of social-cooperative psychological outcomes in China.