2021-22 Abstract: Impact of violence on the formation of children’ social preferences in the Sahel region of Africa 

How does growing up in conditions of extreme adversity impacts the formation of social preferences? To answer this question, our project examines the development of social preferences in vulnerable children in the turbulent Sahel region of Africa. We will evaluate fairness preferences, altruism, anti-social preferences, and conformity to social norms that underpin a healthy and nourishing social fabric. Field experiments utilizing behavioral economics games on social preferences will be conducted with children in two geographically distinct regions of Burkina Faso and Mali: one in the southwest relatively peaceful area, and one in the northeast currently suffering from extreme violence triggered by recurrent Islamist militant incursions. These data will contribute to our knowledge of the influence of early exposure to violence on the formation of social preferences and social norms. They will also be used to inform interventions to foster prosocial motivations, social values, attitudes, and social norms that promote cooperation. This collaborative project with institutions of higher education in the Sahel region, France, and the US uses a multi-disciplinary approach of behavioral economics, social psychology and developmental psychology. This project also brings a unique opportunity for educating undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty in behavioral economics and psychology in a developing part of the world, which is largely underrepresented in academic research. 

2018-19 Abstract: Using Language to Promote Sustainable Consumption 

In contemporary society, population growth combined with global warming concerns has made the adoption of innovative, sustainable products a crucial global issue, leading groups such as the World Health Organization to list health and sustainable development as key issue to tackle in upcoming years. However, while sustainability can be beneficial both for the environment and society at large, many people find some of the most promising sustainable products such as recycled wastewater and insect-based food disgusting. This hinders the adoption of these products that could otherwise have a beneficial impact on reducing global water shortages as well as our ecological footprint. Therefore, the purpose of this grant is to explore ways to nudge individuals into consuming sustainable but aversive products, specifically by examining the impact of presenting these products in a native versus non-native language. Prior research suggests that using a non-native language influences judgments and decisions by attenuating emotions; as such, it may also reduce the feelings of disgust aversive products elicit and thereby increase their consumption. To examine this hypothesis, we will describe to participants from three continents sustainable but aversive products in their native or a foreign language, and then offer them the opportunity to consume the products. We will also collect ratings of disgust as well as physiological indicators of visceral reactions. We expect that bilinguals using a foreign language to experience less disgust and consequently to consume more of these products. Positive findings could be used to build concrete interventions to increase sustainable practices worldwide. 

2020-21 Abstract: Cross-National Negotiation: The Role of Language Format Choice  

Negotiation is central to human interaction as it is an important tool to discover mutual interests and mediate conflicting positions. And increasingly in a globalized economy, governments, corporations, and individuals need to negotiate cross-nationally for reasons such as diplomacy, peacekeeping operations, relief missions and business deals. Boaz Keysar is exploring how the role of language can affect the negotiation process and outcome, and plans to conduct negotiation simulations in Europe using either an interpreter or a common language, usually English, and comparing the these two options to the overall negotiation outcomes and level of positive interaction.   

Biography:

My name is Yu (Eugene) Ji. I am a PhD candidate working in Leslie Kay Lab in the Department of Psychology. My earlier research in the lab focused on modeling oscillations and synchronizations in the mammalian olfactory systems and cognitive relationships between human language, vision, and smell. My current thesis research focuses on developing new modeling methodology to study how language cognition and social and cultural processes interact and “synchronize” with each other. 

Dissertation:

Recent developments in cognitive science, computational linguistics, and computational social sciences propose various theories and methods modeling large-scale interactions between cognition, culture, and society based on social and historical corpus data, but they face multiple challenges particularly in methodology and empirical interpretation and evaluation. This thesis develops a cognitively-driven computational model for mapping topologies and variations of semantic categories, and provides a new computational framework for modeling semantic categorical relations and interactions between cognition and language in historical and social processes. Specifically, the study proposes a graphical and geometrical methodology for modeling and measuring how the mechanism of statistical learning at the individual cognitive level may drive or interact with long-term changes in semantic categories under the conditions of the presence or absence of large-scale population migration and the change of political institution or institution-level language policy. Empirically, the model and methodology are applied to the textual data in ancient and modern Chinese in several literary and textual genres from the late imperial to the modern periods, quantifying how semantic categories in color, smell, kinship, shape, and classifier in different social and political settings change across more than six-hundred year of Chinese history.