Welcome to this year’s Brain, Behaviour & Society Keynote Lecture 2022 entitled

“Explanation and prediction of cultural change”

Igor Grossmann studies people and cultures, sometimes together, and often across time. He is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, where he directs the Wisdom and Culture Lab. His interests span multiple disciplines and methods, including big data, intensive longitudinal surveys, and behavioral experiments to target complex societal issues.

Abstract

It is self-evident that human cultures are not static—consider how art, fashion, child rearing, and the workplace have changed in recent decades and especially in the last two years. Yet, how well do psychological scientists capture the dynamic nature of psychological and societal processes? How accurate are they at estimating and predicting cultural change and what strategies are they using to arrive at their conclusions? In the first part of my talk, I will illustrate a few examples of long- and short-term societal changes in human psychology, with implications for inferences psychologists tend to draw about human nature. Next, using COVID-19 pandemic as a lens, I will turn to behavioral and social scientists’ intuitions about cultural change. I will show that at the onset of the pandemic, scientists made a range of predictions about how societies will evolve, and every fourth case (out of 700 analyzed media interviews with scientists) they did so outside their domain-specific expertise, chiefly basing their judgments on intuitions and analogies. Moreover, large-scale prediction surveys conducted in spring and fall of 2020 (N = 717) show that behavioral scientists’ intuition-based judgments about cultural change were largely inaccurate: they were no more accurate than the average American, and that they did not update their inaccurate expectations in the face of six months of experience. Similarly, in the Behavioral and Social Science Forecasting Collaborate tournament with over 120 teams of scientists from around the world, data point predictions about cultural change in well-being, prejudice, and political attitudes for 2020-2021 were not better than naïve statistical benchmarks (e.g., linear regression, average of historical trends) or wisdom of naïve crowds. These insights matter, because lay public generally expected psychological scientists to make accurate predictions, and preferred their recommendations to base COVID-related policy responses on societal change. In the final part of the talk, I will discuss ways to increase intuitions and reasoning about cultural change in our field, calling for graduate training in methods helping to quantitatively model prediction (vs. chiefly reply on qualitative post-hoc explanations).

Location

Date: Wednesday April 6th, 7pm (CEST)
Location: HS 02.01, Universitätsplatz 2 and online via UniTube Graz
CoVID-19 Measures: Access is only possible with a valid 2.5 G proof. FFP2 masks have to be worn strictly all time.

Registration

Due to the still ongoing CoVID-pandemic seats are limited and registration for this event is mandatory. Please register here for in person and online attendance. Online participants will receive a link to the online event shortly beforehand.</p>