Aaron Benjamin

Aaron Benjamin, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will give a virtual presentation in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar on Thursday 6 October, 17:00-18:00).

The metacognition of participation

The applied science of cognition often takes the classroom as a model situation. In a classroom, students play only a small role in choosing learning activities, and those activities are shared across students with a wide spectrum of abilities and interests. In most other arenas in life, the cognitive activities in which we participate are ones for which we volunteer, and in which we play the major role in scheduling our work and deciding when we quit. In this talk, I explore the consequences of self-selection on a wide variety of cognitive activities. Choice over participation affects the interpretation of group data, the extent to which individuals benefit from cognitively enhancing events like memory tests, how crowd wisdom can be harnessed, and how artificial agents can be designed to have fruitful interactions with human users. I hope to convince you that questions of participation should be front and center in any applied science of cognition.

Markus Strohmaier

Markus Strohmaier, Chair for Data Science in the Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, will give a presentation (virtual) in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 29 September, 12:00-13:00).

Interpretability of large-scale neural models of text

We introduce “POLAR”—a framework that adds interpretability to pre-trained word embeddings via the adoption of semantic differentials. Semantic differentials are a psychometric construct for measuring the semantics of a word by analyzing its position on a scale between two polar opposites (e.g., cold–hot, soft–hard). The core idea of our approach is to transform existing, pre-trained word embeddings via semantic differentials to a new “polar” space with interpretable dimensions defined by such polar opposites. Our framework also allows for selecting the most discriminative dimensions from a set of polar dimensions provided by an oracle, i.e., an external source. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by deploying it to various downstream tasks and discuss its applications and various settings.

Danny Osborne

Danny Osborne, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand, will give an online presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 22 September, 10:00-11:00).

Is the personal always political? Examining the boundaries of the relationship between personality and political attitudes

Over the past decade, research in political psychology has focused on documenting the relationship between people’s personality and their corresponding political attitudes. These studies consistently demonstrate that the Big-Five’s Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. Recently, however, the cross-situational (and between-person) consistency of these findings has been called into question. In this talk, I will present a programme of research showing that both (a) aspects of the environment (e.g., level of societal threat) and (b) individual differences (e.g., amount of political knowledge) moderate the relationship between personality and politics. In doing so, I aim to highlight the previously-neglected conditional nature of the relationship between personality and politics, while also demonstrating the benefits of a truly integrative—both in terms of theory and methodology—political psychology.