Latest Past Events

Scott Wiltermuth – I’d Only Let You Down: Guilt Proneness and the Avoidance of Harmful Interdependence

Scott Wiltermuth: USCFive studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one’s self could trigger feelings of guilt.  Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those […]

Carl T. Bergstrom – Dealing With Deception in Biology

Carl T. Bergstrom: Washington UniversityOver the past 3.5 billion years, living organisms have evolved to acquire, store, analyze, and transmit information. This information processing capacity has allowed organisms to build up increasingly complex social organizations predicated on the effective coordination and cooperation. Coordination and cooperation in turn require honest communication among the participants in a […]

Joshua Greene – Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason & the Gap Between Us and Them

Joshua Greene: Harvard UniversityIn this talk I'll present some of the main themes in my book of the same title. First, there are two general kinds of moral problems: The original moral problem is the problem of cooperation, the “Tragedy of the Commons”—Me vs. Us. Distinctively modern moral problems are different. They involve what I […]