Psychology Program Presents
How Do We Learn that Niffs are Good and Laaps are Bad?
Thursday, October 27, 2016
RKC 111
4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Benedek Kurdi, Harvard University
Among the miracles that human minds perform every day is to learn new information. In my work, I study social learning, specifically the mind’s ability to form attitudes, that is, to attach qualities like good and bad to people that we meet in our environment. I study this issue by creating online experiments in which I teach people about novel groups called Niffians and Laapians. One of them is always the good one and the other one is always the bad one. The main question that I am trying to answer is the following: What is the most effective method for shifting people’s attitudes towards these two groups? In my studies, participants learn about Niffs and Laaps in one of two ways. The first method is language-based: Participants are simply told, “Niffs are good. Laaps are bad.” The second method is experience-based: Participants are presented with members of the Niff and Laap groups paired with pictures of pleasant and unpleasant objects. For instance, individual Niffs are associated with pictures of puppies and individual Laaps are associated with pictures of cockroaches. A third group of participants receive a combination of both methods—language-based instructions are followed by actual experience. When time comes to test learning, I use the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a method that measures the strength of automatic association between groups like Niffs and Laaps with attributes like good and bad. In the talk I will discuss the results of these experiments, why I find them surprising, what they teach us about learning, and what they might mean for how we relate to real-world social groups like foreigners or the elderly.For more information, call 845-758-7224, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 4:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: RKC 111