The SWE colloquium on Thursday 22 October (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Michael Siegrist, Professor of Consumer Behavior, ETH Zürich. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

The yuck emotion: How disgust influences people’s risk perceptions and behavior

Food intake, sexuality or interactions with other humans do not only have obvious benefits, but these activities are also associated with the risk of getting in contact with pathogens. Disgust is part of the behavioral immune system that reduces the contact with and thus the likelihood of infections from bacteria, parasites and viruses. The mouth is one important entry point for pathogens. Therefore, we developed a food disgust sensitivity scale that has been shown to be reliable and valid. I will present results of various experiments and surveys suggesting that disgust sensitivity is not only related to hygienic behavior, food intake and food waste production, but also how immigrants are perceived. High food disgust sensitive people are more afraid of illnesses brought into the country from immigrants compared with low food disgust sensitive people. We could further demonstrate that people with high food disgust sensitivity have difficulties to ignore disgust evoking cues that are clearly not associated with the risk of pathogens. Disgust is also a factor that influences people’s risk perceptions of food hazards and the acceptance of novel food technologies. Disgust is an important emotion that protects us, but there is also a dark side to this emotion.

The SWE colloquium on Thursday 8 October (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Björn Meder, University of Potsdam. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

Understanding of and reasoning with verbal uncertainty terms

Dealing with different degrees of frequency and probability is important not only in science, but also in our everyday lives. Relevant information, however, does not always come in the form of numerical estimates or direct experiences, but is instead obtained through qualitative, rather vague verbal terms (e.g., “the virus often causes coughing” or “it’s likely to rain”). Understanding how people make sense of such verbal expressions and how they represent and utilize this kind of information is therefore critical to understand cognition and behavior in many real-world situations. I will focus on three key issues. First, when does a shared understanding of verbal uncertainty terms emerge in development? Second, how can we formally represent the vagueness of verbal uncertainty terms and build computational models of reasoning with such information? Third, how good are people when making probabilistic inferences based on verbal uncertainty terms, compared to reasoning with numerical information and relative to normative benchmarks? I conclude by discussing ideas and pathways for investigating judgment and decision making with verbal information within a computational modeling framework.