Single Review on past events

Jolene Tan is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Zukunftskolleg affiliated with the Department of Psychology.

In her talk "Investigating social decisions as signal detection tasks: The case of forgivenes", Jolene tackled the question of how we decide whether to forgive, punish, or cooperate with another agent.

These distinct psychological systems have similar design principles based on tradeoffs in costs and benefits. They share two features that make them signal detection and error management tasks: they have to be made under uncertainty, and have decision outcomes with asymmetric fitness costs and benefits. Making each of these decisions requires estimating the strength of evidence that engaging with the agent will be fitness enhancing, and then comparing it to a selected decision criterion (i.e., applying a bias) based on tradeoffs in the cost of errors and considerations of the social base rate. Similar information is likely to be implicated across these decisions with the evidence strength being informed by the target agent’s welfare tradeoff ratio towards the decision maker, and the decision bias being informed by estimations of error costs and the base rate. Jolene used the example of forgiveness to show how this insight guided her investigation of the decision process. She presented two studies that combine experiments with cognitive modeling to investigate how individuals forgive.