We are excited to welcome the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics from Harvard Univerisity, Mahzarin R. Banaji.
She will give her talk, "Implicit Social Cognition," on Friday, September 20th, beginning at 1:30 pm in Room 23.
Abstract:
How deep are the bounds and flexibilities on human thinking and feeling and how do they shape social interactions and decisions? For the past 40 years, I have studied the mental systems of attitude and belief that operate relatively outside conscious awareness, control or intention (i.e., implicit social cognition, ISC). Early work was guided by the result that automatically elicited social preferences and beliefs are at odds with consciously expressed preferences and beliefs, including one’s own cherished moral values. Later work, pursued as three distinct and sequential paths, yielded new understanding of ISC: evidence from patterns of brain activation, evidence from the minds of young children, and evidence from studies of large language corpora and more recently, LLMs. These studies have shaped my understanding of the universality and cultural variations of ISC, its malleability, and covariation with socially significant outcomes. I will provide an overview of this entire research program with special attention to offering graduate students reflections on one career in science: about the benefits of assigning theory a backseat in the planning of research, about developing a spine to pursue serendipitous results even at cost to career development, about stating one’s predictions publicly enough to be shown to be wrong (by one’s students), and the power of collaborations across disciplines.
This talk is supported by a Diversity and Inclusion Project Grant from the Department of Psychology and is open to the public.