NOTICE
Unfortunately, the colloquium was canceled.

Date & Time: 2022. 8. 22 (Mon) 13:00-14:30

Location: Onsite & Online Hybrid Meeting
Hokkaido University, Faculty of Humanities and Human Scieces, room E304
Zoom Metting (Please send an email to m.takezawa@let.hokudai.ac.jp with the title “CERSS Colloquium Participation Request” and we will send you back the Zoom URL.)

Speaker: Sergey Gavrilets (Distinguished Professor,Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department of Mathematics Director, Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity (DySoC) University of Tennessee)

Title: Disentangling material, social, and cognitive determinants of human behavior and beliefs

Abstract: 
In social interactions, human decision-making, attitudes, and beliefs about others coevolve. Their dynamics are affected by cost-benefit considerations, cognitive processes (such as cognitive dissonance, social projecting, and logic constraints), and social influences by peers (via descriptive and injunctive social norms) and by authorities (e.g., educational, cultural, religious, political, administrative, individual or group, real or fictitious). Here we attempt to disentangle some of this complexity by using an integrative mathematical modeling and a 35-day online behavioral experiment. We utilize data from a Common Pool Resources experiment with or without messaging promoting a group-beneficial level of resource extraction.

We show that material payoffs accounted only for about 20% of decision-making. The remaining 80% was due to different cognitive and social forces which we evaluated quantitatively. Between-individual variation is present in all measured characteristics and notably impacts observed group behavior.

Our results have implications for understanding and predicting social processes triggered by certain shocks (e.g., social unrest, a pandemic, or a natural disaster) and for designing policy interventions aiming to change behavior (e.g. actions aimed at environment protection or climate change mitigation).

Masanori Takezawa, Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences
e-mail: m.takezawa@let.hokudai.ac.jp