Behavioral Science Workshops

Workshop Details

• Where: 黑料传送门 Booth Harper Center, Classroom C06. Workshops will be offered IN-PERSON ONLY.
• When: Mondays 10:10–11:30 a.m. (unless otherwise noted)
• Who can attend: Workshops are open to Roman Family Center faculty, researchers, staff, and students, plus invited guests. Additional requests to attend the workshop are handled on a case-by-case basis. Please email yui.ito@chicagobooth.edu if you’d like to attend.
• Archive: For a full list of presenters 2004-present, see our workshop archive.

 

Fall Workshop Series 

 

Monday, September 29, 2025

Tania Lombrozo
Princeton University

"Varieties of Belief"

In both scientific psychology and folk psychology, we often appeal to “belief” as a mental state. For example, psychologists talk about “belief bias” and “belief polarization,” and in everyday conversation, we might explain why someone behaved as they did by appeal to their beliefs. In this talk I’ll explore the possibility that “belief” is not a unitary mental state, but a superordinate term that captures a range of somewhat different cognitive attitudes. The key distinction will be between “epistemic beliefs,” which have the primary function of tracking the truth, and “non-epistemic beliefs,” which primarily serve other functions, such as motivation, social signaling, or emotion regulation. I’ll begin with a theoretical overview before presenting some recent empirical evidence supporting the reality of this distinction in theory of mind.

Monday, October 6, 2025

William Brady
Northwestern University

"Algorithm-mediated social learning"

Social information is the currency of human culture, and it is increasingly encountered in online social networks where information flow is controlled by algorithms. In practice, this has generated a significant problem: social information encountered online is often highly unrepresentative of all the people in a given social network. Focusing on the context of politics, I argue that the problem of unrepresentativeness is best explained as an emergent phenomenon that arises when humans and social media algorithms learn from one another (‘algorithm-mediated social learning’). I will present a series of experiments in the lab and in a large field experiment that find social media algorithms exploit human social learning biases toward PRestigious, Ingroup, Moral and Emotional information, or PRIME information) in ways that distort our understanding of social norms. This work also examines consequences of algorithm-mediated social learning for intergroup relations, and test newly designed algorithms that mitigate unrepresentativeness, offering possible paths toward healthier online information environments. 

 

Monday, October 20, 2025

Charles Rafkin
University of British Columbia

"Social Preferences and Bargaining Failure in Eviction"

We study how social preferences shape landlord–tenant bargaining over eviction using labin-the-field experiments in Memphis, Tennessee. 24% of rent-delinquent tenants and 15% of landlords exhibit hostility, burning money to harm the other, yet majorities of both are highly altruistic. Social preferences correlate with eviction and related behaviors. Embedding these patterns in a bargaining model, hostility and misperceptions render 19% of evictions inefficient, even as altruism sustains others’ efficient bargaining. Social preferences undermine policy targeting, as altruists more often take up rental assistance but evict less. Heterogeneous social preferences thus both destroy and create bargaining surplus, and limit gains from policy.

Monday, October 27, 2025

Desmond Ang
Harvard University

"World War I and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan (with Sahil Chinoy)"

The post-World War I era witnessed a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, with membership swelling into the millions during the 1920s. Drawing on newly digitized military records and KKK membership rosters, we examine the relationship between military service and subsequent Klan participation among white veterans. Reconstructing the WWI draft lottery, we find that white men randomly inducted into the Army were significantly more likely to join the KKK than observably similar undrafted men from the same communities. This effect was particularly pronounced among men conscripted from regions with stronger expressions of patriotic sentiment and those with the most exposure to Klan-targeted groups while in the military and were accompanied by corresponding changes in individual party affiliation. Zooming out, we document significant spillovers of military conscription onto the Klan participation of neighbors and household members. These findings contribute to our understanding of how wartime experiences shaped racial attitudes and mobilized white supremacist activity in interwar America.

Monday, November 3, 2025

Erica Bailey
UC Berkeley

"Authentic to Whom? The Interpersonal Dynamics of Authenticity Perceptions"

Authenticity has traditionally been understood as an internal pursuit—a matter of acting in accordance with one’s inner or core self. Yet authenticity has increasingly become a social expectation: people now demand authenticity from their organizations, leaders, colleagues, and peers. As a result, understanding how people perceive the authenticity of others is critically important. In this talk, I present two projects that examine both the biases that distort and the strategies that enhance perceived authenticity. In the first, I utilize round-robin ratings among small teams of students (10,104 observations) to show that authenticity judgments are biased by similarity: people perceive others with similar personality profiles as more authentic. In the second, I identify a simple yet surprising strategy for increasing perceived authenticity: offering rationales for one’s behavior. Across multiple studies, I find that when people explain why they are doing what they are doing, they are perceived as more authentic because they seem more relatable. Together, these findings reveal both the biases that shape authenticity perceptions and the communicative behaviors that make people appear more genuine and real to others.