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 “How can we understand the nature of preferences, given recent findings that stable idiosyncratic differences account for most of the variance of complex preferences (e.g., more than 80% in the case of perceived facial “trustworthiness” and basic color preferences)?” Standard research practices, including computational modeling, typically aggregate across participants, assuming consistent mapping from perceptual features to evaluations and preferences. Yet recent research shows that this mapping is highly heterogeneous across people. We will consider different approaches to studying the heterogeneity of preferences: from statistical modeling of variance components to building of data-driven computational models, visualizing individual preferences. We will also consider the broad implications of the findings for experimental design, modeling of cognitive processes, and understanding the heterogeneity of treatment effects in field studies.
