There’s Nothing Social about Social Priming: Derailing the “Train Wreck”

What's social about social learning?

Research on social learning in animals has revealed a rich variety of cases where animals--from caddis fly larvae to chimpanzees--acquire biologically important information by observing the actions of others. A great deal is known about the adaptive functions of social learning, but very little about the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. Even in the case of imitation, a type of social...

Medical aspects of the Swampscott train-wreck disaster.

Anatomy of a Train Wreck: Causes of the Mortgage Meltdown

Why did the mortgage market melt down so badly? Why were there so many defaults when the economy was not particularly weak? Why were the securities based upon these mortgages not considered anywhere as risky as they actually turned out to be? It is the thesis of this paper that, in an attempt to increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, an attack on underwriting ...

Reasoning about social choices and social relationships

We study inferences about social choices—choices that affect people besides the chooser. Social choices depend on the relationships between the people involved: for example, whether they are friends, strangers, or enemies. We propose that these different social relationships correspond to different ways in which the chooser weights another person’s utility relative to her own. We describe a pro...

What is social about social perception research?

A growing consensus in social cognitive neuroscience holds that large portions of the primate visual brain are dedicated to the processing of social information, i.e., to those aspects of stimuli that are usually encountered in social interactions such as others' facial expressions, actions, and symbols. Yet, studies of social perception have mostly employed simple pictorial representations of ...