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.

 

Spring Workshop Series 

 

Monday, March 23, 2026

Gus Cooney
Dartmouth College

"The Computational Basis of Conversational Pessimism"

Conversation is a subject of increasing interest across the social, cognitive, and computational sciences. However, the empirical study of conversation requires an essential infrastructure that is currently lacking. This talk highlights our recent initiatives in building this infrastructure: developing one of the largest public datasets of naturalistic conversation; introducing methodological techniques for segmenting speech-to-text transcripts into conversational turns; and creating a video-capture platform for efficiently running conversation studies online. I then present a computational model that provides a unified framework for understanding people's systematically pessimistic beliefs about their ability to connect with others during conversation. The talk concludes with thoughts on the future of interaction science, which will require new techniques to bridge the gap between turn-by-turn conversational dynamics and the broader impressions, judgments, and decisions that emerge from social interaction.

Monday, March 30, 2026

Gabrielle Adams
University of Virginia

"Bridging Individual and Structural Bias"

Social injustice in the form of racism has been and continues to be one of the most insidious problems of our time. Such injustice occurs as individual and interpersonal racism, in terms of people’s prejudiced attitudes, stereotypes, and discriminatory behavior. It also occurs at the structural level via the institutions, policies, and cultural norms that perpetuate inequality. In my research, I find that structural explanations tend to obscure the role of individuals. Structural explanations reduced participants’ perceptions that individuals are responsible for discrimination compared to various control conditions. My research further suggests that people tend not to understand how individual and structural racism dynamically reinforce one another, due to a phenomenon we term “indivisible hand thinking.” However, I also find teaching people about the link between individual and structural racism can motivate people to take individual action and support diversity-related policies.

Monday, April 6, 2026

Gavin Kilduff
New York University

"The Psychology of Rivalry: A relationally-dependent analysis of competition"

This research investigates the origins, consequences, and underlying psychology of rivalry, a competitive relationship that serves to increase the psychological stakes of competition independent of any tangible stakes. In this talk, I will focus specifically on work that examines how rivals may come to feel relational identification with each other, and how rivalry between organizations may foster intraorganizational identification and commitment.

Monday, April 13, 2026

Nir Halevy
Stanford University

"Cooperation by Design"

Interactive decision-making often produces suboptimal outcomes and experiences, such as coordination failures and impasses in negotiation. How can we redirect interactions away from lose-lose and win-lose outcomes and toward mutually beneficial, win-win outcomes? This talk considers several pathways to promoting win-win outcomes across multiple contexts, ranging from interactions between robbers and victims to those between wedding planners, vendors and clients. I will focus on five pathways to promoting win-win outcomes: Giving others voice in negotiation, engaging in helpful brokering, changing incentive structures, changing choice sets and defaults, and fixing broken hierarchies.

Monday, April 20, 2026

Lara Aknin
Simon Fraser University

*Topic and more details to be announced.

Monday, April 27, 2026

Matthew Lieberman
University of California, Los Angeles

"Connection, Conflict, & Consciousness: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Approach"

Consciousness and human subjectivity are some of the thorniest philosophical topics, while loneliness and polarization are two of the most practical, yet intractable issues in our modern world.  My talk will focus on how an understanding of pre-reflective consciousness and subjectivity will help us understand the neurocognitive bases promoting loneliness and polarization.  More specifically, my talk will focus on a region of the brain (“gestalt cortex”) that supports multiple forms of “seeing” including visual, psychological, and semantic seeing.  Neural synchrony in gestalt cortex provides a relatively direct measure of when people are sharing ways of seeing.  Using these insights we have developed interventions meant to address loneliness and polarization.  I will end by discussing the company (“Resonance”) that I co-founded to address a lack of social connection in the real world.

Monday, May 4, 2026

Daniel Ames
Columbia University

*Topic and more details to be announced.

Monday, May 11, 2026

Joshua Ackerman
University of Michigan

"Ill-Logical: Making Sense of the Psychology of Infection"

Infectious disease is an inescapable feature of human life, yet our everyday responses to it are seriously problematic. We misidentify its presence, stigmatize those who bear its cues, make questionable decisions to avoid it, suffer when ill, deceive others in ways that endanger their health, and excuse behaviors that facilitate its spread. What makes these problems remarkable is not that they exist, but that each one is functional. Every apparent error solves a problem. Our psychology of infection is not illogical… it is ill-logical. In this talk, I present research organized according to two core human health goals: evading the agents of disease and managing sickness once we fail. I argue that the pursuit of these goals reflects a common motivational architecture shaped by fundamental social tradeoffs from self-protection vs. affiliation to signaling health vs. seeking care to personal interest vs. collective welfare. Understanding these tradeoffs offers a framework for explaining consequential decisions people make at work, as consumers, and in their social lives.

Monday, May 18, 2026

Erin Westgate
University of Florida

*Topic and more details to be announced.