Quels grands principes faut-il respecter quand on communique avec le public ? Comment favoriser la coopération de tous ? Comment la confiance se construit-elle ? Pourquoi il faut mettre plus d’énergie pour faire accepter les recommandations que pour combattre les “fake news”? Autant de questions qui ont été abordées dans le cadre de cet événement.
Western history of thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought. Yet people often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge (or information) deliberate ignorance. Using examples from a wide range of domains, we demonstrate that deliberate ignorance has important functions. We systematize types of deliberate ignorance, describe their functions, discuss their normative desirability, and consider how they can be modeled. To date, psychologists have paid relatively little attention to the study of ignorance, let alone the deliberate kind.
Language is a product of learning in individuals, and universal structural features of language presumably reflect properties of the way in which we learn. But language is not necessarily a direct reflection of properties of individual learners: languages are culturally-transmitted systems, which persist in populations via a repeated cycle of learning and use, where learners learn from linguistic data which represents the communicative behaviour of other individuals who learnt their language in the same way.
For research and policy-development in public health, it is crucial to understand the spread of ideas and beliefs as well as diseases. Conspiracy theories about secret agendas behind vaccination programmes, the side effects of medical treatments, and cover-ups by the government or pharmaceutical industry are prevalent in many countries and can have devastating effects on health and well-being.
The uptake of a fertility-reducing technology, such a modern contraception, directly challenges Darwinian notions of fitness. Evolutionary approaches have proposed numerous mechanisms for explaining the origins, spread and maintenance of low fertility through the adoption of fertility-reducing behaviour. However, the literature has not yet engaged with the reversible dynamics of contraceptive behaviour at the individual level (adopt, discontinue, re-adopt).
The alarming spread of entirely fabricated news stories - "fake news" - during the 2016 US Presidential election is a salient example of how human reasoning often fails. How do we explain such errors? I will outline two broad perspectives on this question with different implications for understanding cognitive capacity and knowledge resistance. One argues that humans reason like good lawyers, and that cognitive sophistication increases political polarization.
A central feature of our species is our unprecedented capacity to develop increasingly complex technologies that have allowed us to colonize and permanently occupy environments for which we are poorly suited biologically. Those technologies have emerged through a process - known as cumulative cultural evolution - that is powered by our strategic reliance on social information and results in the gradual accumulation of innovations.
Moral and political arguments based on the consequences of actions would seem to be incommensurate with arguments based on protected values (values about actions, not consequences). Indeed, some empirical evidence suggests that the two have quite different psychological properties. Protected values discourse leads to a greater sense of understanding and a reduced willingness to compromise. Accordingly, encouraging a consequentialist perspective by requesting causal explanations can reduce group polarization.
[Covid – 19] En raison de la situation actuelle, par mesure de prévention et de protection de santé publique, nous avons décidé de reporter à l'année prochaine les cinq conférences prévues du 16 au 20 mars à l'ENS.
La 22e édition de La Semaine du Cerveau a lieu du 16 au 22 mars 2020. Cet événement est organisé en France par la Société des Neurosciences.
