Sumários
Through the Looking Glass: A Lens-Based Account of Intersectional Stereotyping
3 Dezembro 2020, 15:30 • Rita Sousa
Lecture given via ZOOM by Christopher Petsko, Duke University
The study of intersectional stereotyping is gaining traction across the behavioral sciences. Broadly, this research reveals that the stereotypes perceivers apply to a person often depend on the multiple social groups to which that person belongs. But this growing literature is plagued by a problem. Many of its findings contradict each other without satisfying explanations as to why. For example, just as there are some contexts in which perceivers stereotype old vs. young Black men as seeming different from one another, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men as seeming indistinguishable from one another. The present talk develops and tests an explanation as to why such findings coexist. Namely, it tests whether perceivers have a tendency to use just one social lens at a time when thinking about intersectional targets-whether perceivers who are using the lens of race , for example, attend to race so strongly that they barely attend, at least in these moments, to targets' other group memberships (e.g., their gender, or their orientation). Four experiments will be presented in support of this general idea, and this idea's implications for the study of stereotyping will be discussed.
Metacognitive myopia: A major obstacle in the way of rational behavior
20 Novembro 2020, 14:30 • Rita Sousa
Lecture given bei Klaus Fiedler, University of Heidelberg, via ZOOM
In this talk, I provide a summary of research on "meta-cognitive myopia" (MM), which I consider to be a major impediment of rational behavior in general, and of debunking failures in particular. MM research shows that people are pretty accurate at processing given information samples, even under high load of complex settings. However, they are uncritical and naïve regarding the history and the validity of information, even when the problem context makes it crystal-clear that it shouldn't be trusted. I illustrate MM with examples from various paradigms: inability to discard irrelevant information; utilization of selectively sampled information; unwarranted reverse inference; sample-size neglect; myopia for aggregation levels, and the notorious utilization of advice that is obviously invalid. MM not only offers alternative accounts of many prominent biases in judgment and decision making, but of the limited success of debunking in particular. The final discussion is concerned with the learning origins of MM and the question of why evolution did not equip homo sapiens with more effective tools for critical assessment.
Theory Construction and the New Experimentalism
20 Novembro 2020, 11:00 • Rita Sousa
Lecture given by Leonel Garcia-Marques, Universidade de Lisboa, via ZOOM
According to classic epistemology (Reichenbach first but also Carnap and Hempel), science production develops into the two contexts of discovery and justification. Theory and hypothesis generation take place in the context of discovery, whereas testing hypotheses and theories occur in the context of justification. Only the latter, however, is taken to properly belong to the realm of epistemology. The generation of new ideas, hypotheses or theories is supposedly an intuitive and nonrational process and does not allow itself to normative analysis. Normative analysis and prescription is reserved to the context of justification (i.e., testing hypotheses and theories). The consequence of this classical distinction is reflected in the contrast between the intensive training that aspiring scientists go through in terms of methods of theory-testing compared to the absence of training or often even of the consideration of theory-generation.
Newer perspectives abandon the distinction altogether and consider the science endeavors as a process of continuous discovery (McGuire), thus allowing for the serious consideration of hypothesis and theory generation.
After introducing the above topics, in my talk, I will provide a brief survey of the proposals of McGuire for training in theory and hypothesis generation. Next, I will deal with a different contribution for theory generation - the production empirical restrictions, as seen in the light of the New Experimentalism (Hacking, Giere, Mayo, Chalmers and others).
Finally, I will combine the perspectivism of McGuire and new experimentalism of Mayo to argue for going beyond the mere teaching of hypothesis and theory-testing and include in our curricula a broader approach that include the stages early idea generation and capitalization of "experiments with life of their own" (Hacking) as a contributions to theory building.
Sensory biases in nonverbal communication
5 Novembro 2020, 14:30 • Rita Sousa
Lecture given by Andrey Anikin via ZOOM
The voice conveys a wealth of information about the speaker's age, dominance, emotional state, etc. Despite great progress in describing how this information is encoded acoustically, a general theory of why particular acoustic features convey particular meanings is still missing. I will consider the role of two fundamental cognitive mechanisms - auditory attention and cross-modal associations - and discuss how they constrain the "acoustic code" in human nonverbal vocalizations such as laughs and screams. The role of auditory attention is formalized in the salience code hypothesis, according to which the vocalizations that signal urgency or high emotion intensity exploit our sensory biases to attract and hold the listeners' attention. The role of cross-modal association is most evident in the low-is-large perceptual bias, which encourages speakers to lower their pitch and resonance frequencies in order to sound large and dominant. I will present the most recent experimental evidence on how these cognitive mechanisms contribute towards a deeper understanding of the general principles of vocal communication, with implications for such wide-ranging fields as the evolution of language and affective computing.
Coordination lecture
23 Outubro 2020, 14:30 • Rita Sousa
Clarification of the objectives, relevance and functioning of the UC
Explanation and clarification of the evaluation scheme