We are delighted to welcome Professor Lasana T. Harris, UCL, to host a research seminar discussing ‘Flexible Social Cognition and Economic Decision-Making’.

 

People flexible engage social cognition—thinking about the minds of others; they spontaneously engage social cognition to imbue targets with full humanity, or deny them full humanity by withholding social cognition. This flexible cognitive process can trigger or inhibit other psychological processes, including logical reasoning, learning, economic valuation, empathic responses, and most relevant here, decision-making. Here, I discuss behavioural and brain evidence for this gating mechanism across economic decision-making.