The prejudices of good people

The Rationality of Prejudices

We model an N-player repeated prisoner's dilemma in which players are given traits (e.g., height, age, wealth) which, we assume, affect their behavior. The relationship between traits and behavior is unknown to other players. We then analyze the performance of "prejudiced" strategies--strategies that draw inferences based on the observation of some or all of these traits, and extrapolate the in...

Sustainable medicine: good for the environment, good for people.

Do people ask good questions?

People ask questions in order to efficiently learn about the world. But do people ask good questions? In this work, we designed an intuitive, gamebased task that allowed people to ask natural language questions to resolve their uncertainty. Question quality was measured through Bayesian idealobserver models that considered large spaces of possible game states. During free-form question generati...

Entitativity and intergroup bias: How belonging to a cohesive group allows people to express their prejudices.

We propose that people treat prejudice as more legitimate when it seems rationalistic-that is, linked to a group's pursuit of collective interests. Groups that appear to be coherent and unified wholes (entitative groups) are most likely to have such interests. We thus predicted that belonging to an entitative group licenses people to express prejudice against outgroups. Support for this idea ca...

Placebo: misunderstandings and prejudices.

BACKGROUND The role of placebos is often misunderstood, leading both to overvaluation and to inappropriate disdain. The effect of a placebo that contains no pharmacologically active substance is often confused with the effect of administration by a physician. The aim of this article is to review the current data on placebos, evaluate these data critically, and provide a well-founded and underst...