This is a graduate seminar for Ph.D. students interested in behavioral science. The course will be divided into two parts.
The first part of the seminar, taught by Professor Chaudhry, will be guided by the question "How can we understand the psychology underlying interdependent social interactions, where each person's decision depends on what they think the other person will do or think?" Topics will include person perception (mental state and trait inference), conversation (incl. language and pragmatic inference), interdependence theory, close relationships, conflict management, impression management, and shared reality.
The second part of the seminar, taught by Professor Todorov, will be guided by the question “To what extent we can generalize from group level data to individual behavior?” Standard research practices, including computational modeling, typically aggregate across participants, implicitly assuming individual variation is unimportant. However, in many domains of the social sciences, this assumption is unwarranted. Starting with methodological and empirical critiques of this assumption, we will focus on one area of research, where it is possible to quantify the importance of individual differences. We will conclude with methodological implications for psychological research.
