In the fall of 2014, Trent Smith delivered a talk titled “The Economics of Information, Deep Capture, and the Obesity Debate.” Here’s the abstract and, below that, the video of his talk.
Are consumers susceptible to manipulation by large corporations? Or are consumers basically rational, able to decide for themselves what to buy and how to live? This lecture will argue that these seemingly contradictory views of the American consumer are not mutually exclusive, and in fact follow directly from economic models of imperfect information. Examples of U.S. food industry practices, both historical and in the ongoing public debate over the causes of the obesity epidemic, serve to illustrate a broader phenomenon: when large industrial producers take steps to limit the information available to consumers, a market breakdown can occur in which low-quality products dominate the market. As a result, consumer welfare and–in the case of food–public health suffers. This would seem to represent a clear instance of the phenomenon known as “deep capture,” in which powerful commercial interests attempt to influence conventional wisdoms that might affect industry profits.
A lecture by Elizabeth F. Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology and Professor of Law and Cognitive Science at University of California, Irvine.
In this lecture, Loftus shows us that people can be led to develop rich false memories for events that never happened. False memories look very much like true ones: they can be confidently told, detailed, and expressed with emotion.
Elizabeth Loftus can make people “remember” that eggs once made them sick or that as children they were briefly lost in a mall, though both “memories” are false.
A high-profile forensic psychologist and memory researcher, Loftus does this not as a parlor trick, although she’s witty and entertaining—and clearly savors toppling the assumptions of TED audiences and, once, 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. For decades, Loftus has led one of the sides in what has been dubbed “the memory wars.”
“I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives,” says the Los Angeles native, now a distinguished professor of social ecology and a professor of law and cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Her UC website playfully describes Loftus as “an expert on nothing.” That’s because her groundbreaking studies of false memories, involving thousands of subjects, drive home the point that human memory is unreliable at best, and malleable enough to wreck the lives of the unjustly accused.
Loftus visited the Radcliffe Institute at the end of April to speak about her 40 years of work in the memory field, which have won her the 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. Loftus, who has a PhD from Stanford, has testified in more than 250 legal cases and consulted on many others, including those of Michael Jackson, Oliver North, O.J. Simpson, and Martha Stewart. Despite often unsparing attacks from the defense (“I often joke that I deserve combat pay,” she says), Loftus can shatter, with sound science, the record/playback notion of how we remember and how memories become narratives. “Memory actually works more like a Wikipedia page,” says Loftus. “You can go into your page and change things. But so can other people.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment, which premiered this week at Sundance to mostly positive reviews, is not always an easy film to watch.
Much of the action takes place in barren 6-foot-wide hallway. The characters–seemingly normal and well-adjusted Stanford students recruited to participate in a landmark 1971 study about the psychology of imprisonment–take their role-playing as prisoner and guard to extremes, turning power-hungry, violent and occasionally sadistic. The “grown-ups,” led by researcher Philip Zimbardo (played by Billy Crudup), watch a live feed of the action from a nearby office and fail to stop the abuse–fueled by their own power trips and unchecked ambition.
None of the men or boys come off looking very good in the film, though director Kyle Patrick Alvarez does a masterful job humanizing them. And it’s impossible to watch without wondering how you’d react if parachuted into Zimbardo’s simulated prison. Would you stand up for yourself–or for the humanity of others? And can we really know until we’ve been there?
“One of the big questions this film deals with is, ‘Are we who we think we are?’” Crudup said when we sat down in Park City, Utah, this week to discuss the film. “This story talks about the ways we don’t fulfill our own moral capacity, and that what we think of as our true self is actually the product of many different situations, institutions, and places.”
Crudup (Almost Famous) is excellent as Dr. Zimbardo, a man who so badly wants to affect positive change in the world–and have an impact as a psychologist–that he’s willing to let his study subjects endure psychological torture for what he perceives as a greater good. It isn’t until the sixth day, when his girlfriend and fellow researcher (played by Juno’s Olivia Thirlby) objects to the experiment’s direction, that he finally accepts the damage he’s doing.
From TEDxMidAtlantic, 2011. Eldar Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on decision-making, and on issues related to behavioral economics, with an emphasis on empirical studies of how people make decisions in situations of conflict and uncertainty.
From Princeton News, an overview of important work being done by Michael North and Situationist friend, Susan Fiske.
Michael North, a fifth-year graduate student in psychology at Princeton University, knew he was lucky to land a summer research position at the University of Michigan after he finished his bachelor’s degree there in 2006.
His task: Sit in a lab for two hours at a time and interview local residents — young and old — for a study on wisdom.
“When the professor told me this, I nodded and said OK, but as a 22-year-old kid I wasn’t really excited about sitting in a basement interviewing old people, as I saw them,” North said. “I thought they would be really boring. I thought they would smell. I thought they would make me feel weird. These were the thoughts I had, honestly.”
But the reality was different. North found that he enjoyed interacting with the older group more than the younger people. “The older people were the ones who showed more interest in the project, they showed more interest in me personally and asked more interesting questions,” North said.
The realization opened his eyes to a field ripe for exploration.
A focus on ageism research
North came to Princeton in 2008 and joined the lab of Susan Fiske, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and a professor of psychology and public affairs. Together, they have put a new emphasis on ageism, or age-based prejudice, focusing on the challenges society faces to adjust to a growing older population and the intergenerational tensions that can result.
The older population in the United States is expected to double in the next 20 years, and the number of older people is likely to reach more than a quarter of the population by 2050, outnumbering children for the first time in history, North and Fiske noted last year in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
“In other words, the people society now considers older and irrelevant are about to become far more common and visible — perhaps more so than ever in modern society,” the researchers wrote.
Those factors make this an ideal time to put a spotlight on the social perceptions of ageism, a generally understudied area in academia, North said.
“It’s not hard to read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal and see that as the baby boomers are getting older, age-discrimination cases are on the rise and worries are growing about the long-term sustainability of Social Security and Medicare,” North said. “The academic literature hasn’t really spoken to these questions.”
The research by North and Fiske homes in on the idea that understanding intergenerational tension is key to understanding ageism. Ageism is the one kind of discrimination, North noted, in which those who are generally doing the discriminating — younger generations — will eventually become part of the targeted demographic.
North and Fiske are making important contributions to ageism research, said Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst who studies aging and adult development.
“Ageism is a topic that touches on many sensitive areas, including older adults themselves, family members, policymakers and the media,” she said. “North and Fiske unpack the stereotypes toward older adults and show how these stereotypes vary in their causes and effects.”
Fiske, a social psychologist, joined the Princeton faculty in 2000. Her most recent book is “Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us” (2012). The research she and North have conducted expands her far-reaching work on stereotypes.
“We have found a variety of evidence, over the past dozen years, that people make sense of each other along two primary and apparently universal dimensions,” Fiske said. “The first is warmth — does the other have good intentions, is that person trustworthy and sociable. The second dimension is competence — can the other enact those intentions. Stereotypically, the middle class are both warm and competent, rich people are cold but competent, homeless people are neither. The default stereotype for older people is well-intentioned (warm) but incompetent.”
What older people ‘should be’
The researchers focus on ageism that is based on what psychologists call prescriptive prejudice. “Instead of describing what old people supposedly are in reality, it ‘prescribes’ what others think old people should be,” Fiske said. “Older people who ‘violate’ these ‘prescriptions’ are punished by those who discriminate against them; older people who adhere to them are rewarded with sympathy and pity.”
The researchers say prescriptive stereotypes center on three key issues:
• Succession, the idea that older people should move aside from high-paying jobs and prominent social roles to make way for younger people;
• Identity, the idea that older people shouldn’t attempt to act younger than they are; and
• Consumption, the idea that older people shouldn’t consume so many scarce resources such as health care.
In studies detailed in an article for the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the researchers found that younger people were more resentful of older people who went against these prescriptive stereotypes, compared with the feelings of middle-aged and older study participants. The article was published online in March.
In a January article in Social Issues and Policy Review, Fiske and North focused on the dangers of lumping together all older people, starting as young as ages 50 or 55. Instead, North and Fiske argue that the “young-old” — generally those still working and in relatively good health — should be considered separately from the “old-old” — generally older people who no longer work and are in poor health.
“Though numerical age is a useful indicator, it is an imprecise one when it comes to distribution of societal resources,” the researchers wrote. “Age-related characteristics are evolving all the time, but social policies seem stuck in the past, uncertain how to accommodate shifting age dynamics (as evidenced by impending Social Security and Medicare crises).”
Further advancing their work, North and Fiske have conducted experiments that helped shape a scale for measuring ageism that is described in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Assessment. The Succession, Identity and Consumption scale “is a promising tool for cutting-edge ageism research, as the population grays and generational equity concerns grow more salient,” the researchers wrote.
North, who is finishing his dissertation on the issue, said he hopes to continue to work on ageism throughout his career, identifying interventions that could lessen or prevent ageism, such as shifting views of the younger about what it means to be older.
“If there’s one take away from this research, it’s that it’s important to focus on the facts of these demographic changes rather than misguided perceptions,” he said. “Talking about these issues helps you find constructive ways to address them.”
Read article, including an interactive image here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In his fascinating lecture, Jonathan Schooler discusses his fascinating research on mind wandering and meta-awareness and tells the story of how that research was influenced by Dan Wegner. Pay attention! The video is below.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In his fascinating lecture, titled “Rethinking Psychological Process,” Robin Vallacher discusses his early friendship and research with Dan Wegner and connects that to some of his intriguing research today on the non-linear, emergent nature of thought processes, and the role of implicit self-esteem. .
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In his thoughtful lecture, titled “Is Dan Wegner a Cook?,” Bill Crano discusses some of Dan Wegner’s very early career, as a graduate student, and then some of his own fascinating research.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In his interesting lecture, Gerald Klore discusses some of Dan Wegner’s books and hobbies and Jerry’s own research on the role of affect as information about the demands on and availability of bodily and social resources.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In this video, Dan Gilbert gives another one of his funny and fascinating talks — this one on the psychology of admitting mistakes and the surprising connection between evidence and an denial.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In this video, Todd Heatherton delivers his untitled talk in which he discusses his research (inspired and influenced in part by Dan Wegner) on “mind imaging” with regard to self-regulation and mind perception.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring the late Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We are highlighting individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, through August and September.
In this video, Bill Swann delivers his talk “Now That’s Devotion,” in which he discusses ways in which his life and work were influenced by Dan Wegner.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here. To review a collection of posts related to Bill Swann’s work, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
Speakers include Dan Gilbert, Susan Fiske, Tim Wilson, Jon Haidt, Henk Aarts, Bill Swann, Todd Heatherton, Thalia Wheatley, Ap Dijksterhuis, Jon Krosnick, Jerry Clore, Bill Crano, Robin Vallacher, Jamie Pennebaker, Jonathan Schooler and Dan Wegner.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We will highlight the individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, over the next month.
In this video, Nick Epley discusses ways in which he “has not recovered” from his encounters with Dan Wegner.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here. To review a collection of posts regarding Nick Epley’s work, click here.
In 2011, a conference honoring Dan Wegner, “Wegstock,” was held at Harvard University.
Speakers include Dan Gilbert, Susan Fiske, Tim Wilson, Jon Haidt, Henk Aarts, Nick Epley, Bill Swann, Todd Heatherton, Thalia Wheatley, Ap Dijksterhuis, Jon Krosnick, Jerry Clore, Bill Crano, Robin Vallacher, Jamie Pennebaker, Jonathan Schooler and Dan Wegner.
The talks are brief and are well worth watching. We will highlight the individual talks, roughly 15 minutes each, over the next month.
In this video, Situationist friend Kurt Gray discusses his research and how Dan Wegner helped to shape it.
To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Dan Wegner’s research, click here. To review a collection of posts regarding Kurt Gray’s work, click here.
The Situationist 