Past Presentation

Ann Senghas: Barnard College of Columbia University, Dept. of PsychologyThe recent emergence of a new sign language among deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua provides an opportunity to study how linguistic features of a language arise and spread. New features that arise must be successfully transmitted from one generation to the next to survive as […]

Trent Smith: UCLA International InstituteThe economic theory of "rational addiction" posits that drug addiction can usefully be viewed as the outcome of an informed decision undertaken on the part of the consumer. I employ a complementary approach to developing a behavioral theory of addiction by identifying circumstances under which addiction-like behavior is the solution to […]

Michael Rose: UC Irvine Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary BiologyHuman behavior is unlike that of all other known animal behavior in its high degree of flexibility and versatility. A problem that is given less attention than it deserves is that flexible behavior is difficult to explain in Darwinian terms. "Free will" poses a challenge to […]

Olav Sorenson: UCLA Anderson School of ManagementStudies have consistently found that social structure influences who transacts with whom, and that actors appear to benefit when exchange occurs embedded within these relations rather than in an unstructured market. Explanations for these results frequently point to their effectiveness in solving problems inherent in the trade of certain […]