Structural thinking about social categories Nadya Vasilyeva Postdoctoral Scholar, Geography of Philosophy Project, UCLA Department of Anthropology Categorical reasoning is one of the cornerstones of psychological functioning, supporting explanation, induction, and learning in virtually every domain of knowledge, including reasoning about social categories. Dominant theories of social cognition focus on the role of internal/essential characteristics […]

A history of our times Tyler Marghetis Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced & Omidyar Fellow, The Santa Fe Institute This is a talk about Time. I start with the tension between, on the one hand, the global diversity in how people conceive of time, and on the other, the […]

How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms Zaneta Thayer Department of Anthropology and Ecology, Evolution, Environment & Society Program, Dartmouth College A remarkably consistent pattern of human variation is the social gradient in health. This is the observation that, both within and between societies, individuals who are socially disadvantaged […]

Representation and understanding in music across cultures Samuel Mehr The Music Lab and Department of Psychology, Harvard University Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about our psychology of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses […]

Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture Pascal Boyer Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychology​ and Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory, Washington University in St. Louis Divination is a good example of a cultural attractor - almost all human […]

Hidden talents in harsh conditions Willem Frankenhuis Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands It is well established that people living in adverse conditions tend to score lower on a variety of social and cognitive tests. However, recent research shows that people may also develop ‘hidden talents’, that is, mental abilities that are enhanced through […]

Impression management as signaling Hugo Mercier Evolution and Social Cognition and Collective Intelligence Teams, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris I claim that impression management can be usefully understood as signaling. One consequence is that impression management should be mostly honest, that is, it should benefit on average both senders (i.e. those who are managing the […]

What is theory of mind? Implications for mind, brain and culture Rebecca Saxe McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Nearly all research on "theory of mind" has focussed on three kinds of inference: (i) explaining observed behaviour in terms of inferred mental states (given she did that, what did she want?); […]