“Implicit Social Cognition”

The Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences (TRIADS) speaker series is co-hosted by  The Center For Empirical Research in the Law and the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. 

Abstract: How deep are the bounds on human thinking and feeling and how do they shape social interactions and decisions? For the past 30 years, I have studied attitudes and beliefs that operate without conscious awareness or conscious control. In social contexts, the decisions that stem from such implicit mental processes can be at odds with consciously expressed preferences and beliefs including one’s own values. From this basic dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes and beliefs we have explored all aspects of the nature of implicit social cognition: its universality and cultural variations, its developmental origins, neural underpinnings, and stability and malleability. I will provide an overview of this research program with special focus on the experiments that are currently underway in the lab using NLP to explore group-based biases in language.

For inquiries contact TRIADS@wustl.edu.