This talk will be presented by CSH External Faculty member Sergey Gavrilets from University of Tennessee on November 12, 2021 at 3 PM (CET) and will take place at the Hub.
If you would like to attend, please send an email to office@csh.ac.at.
Title: “Disentangling material, social, and cognitive determinants of human behavior and beliefs”
Abstract:
Human decision-making in social situations is affected by a diversity of factors including material cost-benefit considerations, normative and cultural influences, learning, and conformity with peers and external authorities (e.g., cultural, religious, political, organizational). Also important are their dynamically changing personal perception of the situation and beliefs about actions and expectations of others as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance and social projection. Recently I developed a unifying mathematical framework capturing a diversity of the above factors (Evolutionary Human Sciences 3: e44 (2021)). In this talk, I’ll discuss the results of a long-term experimental economics study testing, validating, and parameterizing my general model within the context of the Common Pool Resources game. Our approach allows us to evaluate and compare the importance of different material and non-material factors in both statistical and economically meaningful ways.