Behavioral Science Workshops

Workshop Details

• Where: Chicago 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.

 

Winter Workshop Series 

 

Monday, January 12, 2026

Steven Franconeri
Northwestern University

"Point Taken: A gamified intervention that creates enlightened disagreements"

Should we drop standardized testing for college or Ph.D. admissions? Allow athletes to join teams based on gender identity? When organizational and public policies bind behavior, human coexistence requires a system for deciding collective policy. Because individuals and like-minded groups have incomplete information, constrained strategies, and biased perspectives, thoughtful debate on those policies is critical. Unfortunately, those debates too often degrade into chaotic fights.

Point Taken provides a scalable solution by translating best practices in conflict resolution and critical thinking into a structured dialogue that can be learned and played in 30 minutes. In this interactive session, you'll play a short game to feel its effects.

Monday, February 2, 2026

Anjali Adukia
University of Chicago

"What We Teach"

The process of formal and informal education, and its associated books and curricular materials, necessarily and by design, transmits knowledge and values desired by society. The presence -- and absence -- of different identities, features, and topics sends messages which can contribute to how children view their own potential and the potential of others, which can then shape subconscious defaults. We apply and develop computational methods from artificial intelligence such as computer vision (converting images to data) and natural language processing (converting text to data) to examine whether and how different messages are communicated through children's content presented in formal and informal settings: (i) four decades of primary school textbooks and (ii) a century of award-winning children's books often found in homes, libraries, and schools. These findings provide a view into the "black box" of education through children’s books in US schools and homes, highlighting what has changed and what has endured.

Monday, February 9, 2026

Lauren Rivera
Northwestern University

"Tainting or Telling: How the Meaning of Social Ties Varies Across Disciplines"

While previous research has analyzed how the presence or absence of social ties shapes labor market outcomes and inequalities, less is known about how employers interpret the value of social relationships in personnel decisions and how these meanings may vary by context. We examine these issues in the context of a high-stakes moment of stratification in academic careers: faculty tenure decisions. Drawing from an archival analysis of more than ten years of external tenure evaluations across four disciplines at two R1 universities, we analyze how evaluators describe their relationships with candidates and the meanings they attribute to various types of ties when evaluating tenure cases. We find distinct cross-disciplinary patterns, which were strongest in sociology and computer science. Sociologists view ties to candidates as tainting, corrupting the integrity of the evaluation process by including potentially biasing information unrelated to the quality of a person’s scholarship. Conversely, in computer science, ties were seen as telling, providing useful information about a candidate’s intellectual, social, and moral qualities that were seen as integral to evaluating the strength of a tenure case. Regardless of the actual strength of the tie, sociologists frequently engaged in a strategy of relational distancing, in which they asserted their impartiality by downplaying their existing connections to a candidate, while computer scientists emphasized the closeness of their social ties with candidates as valuable affective and informational resources to be embraced in review. Interviews with faculty in both disciplines shed light on processes underlying these patterns. Overall, the study reveals that the use, meaning, and value of social ties in evaluation are not universal but rather vary according to cultural norms embedded within different institutional contexts and the structure of work in particular settings.

Monday, February 23, 2026

Christian Unkelbach
University of Cologne

"Truth and Trust or: The interpersonal challenge of correcting false information"

Evaluating the truth of information is a central task for navigating the social world, both online and offline. While modern technologies make seeking advice on information veracity seemingly effortless, misinformation continues to spread at an alarming rate (Thagard, 2024). I will first present a functional Brunswikian model of how people come to believe information in the first place. I will then discuss experimental evidence on how advice from advisors of varying trustworthiness influences these beliefs, using incentivized decisions on high-relevance topics (e.g., climate change, health, or democracy). Finally, I will show the consequences of the advice for trust in the advisors. Even in the case of experimentally manipulated beliefs, it often fails to trigger belief revision. Instead, it leads to advisor devaluation on average. The presented model thus offers a framework for predicting when revision attempts will succeed and when they are likely to backfire—leaving the original belief intact while eroding trust in the source.

Monday, March 2, 2026

Tristan Botelho
Yale University

"Customers in Charge: Racial Inequality and Work Precarity on an On-Demand Labor Platform for Small Business Entrepreneurs"

On-demand labor markets are an increasingly prominent organizational form that reshapes how work is allocated. Drawing on proprietary back-end data from a home-services digital platform (e.g., for maintenance, electrical, plumbing work), we analyze nearly 100,000 job matches from 2016–2019 in which homeowners are assigned to small business service entrepreneurs in an as-good-as-random manner. We find that non-White workers face customer cancellation rates that are 13% to 24% higher than those for White workers, generating greater schedule disruption and requiring additional effort to achieve comparable outcomes. We further examine the customer-platform relationship, such as customers’ prior platform experience, neighborhood use, and platform design features that convey worker information (e.g., ratings and photos), shape these racial disparities.