Virtual Discussion
US Mountain Time
Speaker:
Thalia Wheatley and Mina Cikara
Our campus is closed to the public for this event.
CounterBalance is the Santa Fe Institute's applied seminar series on belief dynamics, focusing on issues such as cyberhate, misinformation, disinformation, and social polarization. The intention of these meetings is two-fold. First, these seminars provide a clearinghouse for practitioners, policy makers, and scholarly researchers to share and discuss new insights. Second, these seminars provide an opportunity to contextualize these insights within the broader understanding of complexity science.
The May 11th CounterBalance session will use psychological and neurological tools to explore the processes through which in-group consensus is maintained, and the biases that exacerbate the in-group / out-group divide.
In-group Consensus and Out-group Bias
09:00 AM - 09:15 AMConversation changes minds and aligns brains
Thalia Wheatley
09:15 AM - 09:30 AMQ&A
09:30 AM - 09:45 AMUnderstanding and combating misperceived polarization
Mina Cikara
09:45 AM - 10:00 AMQ&A
10:00 AM - 10:30 AMGroup Discussion
Speakers
Thalia WheatleyExternal Professor SFI - Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Social Brain Sciences at Dartmouth
Thalia Wheatley is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Director of the Center for Social Brain Sciences at Dartmouth. Her research program investigates how ideas and emotions are created collectively and how one person can influence another in ways that ripple across the social webs they inhabit. Using diverse methods including neuroimaging, natural language processing, cross-cultural behavior and social network analysis, Wheatley is building a framework to understand how minds couple with each other and why that coupling is so important to the stability and resilience of neural and social networks.
Mina CikaraAssociate Professor, Harvard University
Professor Cikara studies how the mind, brain, and behavior change when the social context shifts from “me and you” to “us and them.” She focuses primarily on how group membership, competition, and prejudice disrupt the processes that allow people to see others as human and to empathize with others. She uses a wide range of tools—standard laboratory experiments, implicit and explicit behavioral measures, fMRI and psychophysiology—to examine failures of empathy, dehumanization, and misunderstanding between groups. Mina Cikara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and director of the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab.