How the Interaction of Mind and Environment Shapes Social Judgments

Mirta Galesic (Professor; Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics, Santa Fe Institute)

Abstract.  There is a curious divide among researchers studying human sociality. Those studying human cultural evolution tend to extol the extraordinary human ability to cooperate and learn from each other and believe it to be the cornerstone of the spectacular success of our species. Social psychologists, in contrast, tend to view human social cognition as fraught with biases that prevent people from understanding their social environments and from using their full potential for cooperation and learning. My colleagues and I attempt to bridge this gap by considering human sociality as a product of an interaction of well-adapted minds and particular statistical structure of their social environments. In this talk, I take a closer look at how people represent and make judgments about their social environments and how the properties of their environments influence their judgments. A very simple quantitative model of social judgments can explain contradictory biases in human social cognition, such as self-enhancement and self-depreciation as well as false consensus and false uniqueness, without assuming faulty minds. I will discuss implications of these findings for public policy and educational programs.