The mechanistic foundations of social bias (SO-BIAS) - Julie Grèzes (LNC2)

Although social surveys suggest that racist and sexist attitudes are becoming less widespread, the facts show that discrimination and inequality persist. The cause of this phenomenon is both structural and individual: structural inequalities are reproduced by individual behaviours in an unintentional way, guided by implicit associations. However, the influence of these implicit biases on behaviour is not irremediable. Individuals can exert some control over their implicit associations in experimental settings, and it appears that improving individuals' ability to control their implicit biases can also help to reduce discrimination.  However, the factors that facilitate or inhibit this control in more complex contexts remain poorly understood. Our project aims to systematically investigate the ways in which implicit biases are generated and the contexts that facilitate or inhibit their expression. In particular, we will manipulate two dimensions of context: mental load and the personal consequences of decisions. By revealing the conditions that favour the emergence of biases or their control, this research has the potential to inform strategies in favour of fairness and equality. 

Measuring agentivity in gamified interactive contexts (MA-GIC) - Valérian Chambon (IJN)

Agency, defined as the ability to exercise control over one's life and pursue goals, is essential to well being, psychological resilience and health. However, current measures of agency are limited: they often treat agency as a unidimensional construct, are prone to cognitive biases (e.g. social desirability), and focus on perceived or felt agency rather than individuals’ preferred forms of agency. These limitations often hinder the generalizability of these measures to real-life contexts. To address this problem, we aim to develop two complementary tools, specifically designed to measure and characterize people’s agentic preferences: a psychometric scale (WP1-1) and a gamified behavioral task (WP1-2), both designed to assess where each individual stands on two key agentic continua, i.e. goal abstraction (concrete vs. abstract) and engagement style (exploration vs. exploitation). These tools will then be used to predict how individuals evaluate different messages in various domains (e.g., work, health, education, leisure) (WP2-1) and, ultimately, to determine whether tailoring interventions to individuals’ agentic preferences promotes preventive health behaviors and improves adherence to health recommendations in real-life contexts (WP2-2). This study will be carried out in the general population, then in a cohort of patients suffering from lung or breast cancer, in collaboration with the Institut Curie and Santé Publique France. This research has the potential to improve the effectiveness of health interventions by tailoring recommendations to individual preferences.

PACE - Hugo Mercier (IJN)

The ability to choose the people we collaborate with—partner choice—is often thought to be the driving force behind the evolution of cooperation, both in humans and in other animals. To choose our cooperation partners, we must be able to evaluate them, which we mostly do along two axes: benevolence—the willingness to provide benefits to others—and competence—the ability to do so. Most research on partner choice has focused on benevolence. Here, we seek to better understand the role of competence in partner choice in three complementary ways. First, we study the evolutionary antecedents of the benevolence/competence distinction and its relation to partner choice. We ask whether the dimensions of competence is taken into account by non-human primates, in the context of partner choice. To answer this question, we will conduct behavioral experiments in Guinea baboons, adapting partner choice paradigms to the question of competence. Second, we formulate and test a general model of how
humans evaluate competence by relying on the difficulty of the task accomplished, and the effort exerted. This model will be mathematically specified using a Bayesian formalism, and experimentally tested, first using general knowledge as an example of competence, then applying the model to other domains. Third, we formulate and test a model of how people should display their competence, in order to appear competent, but without overly inflating their competence and thus jeopardizing their reputation. We will test this model using first the example of general knowledge. This project will help us better understand how humans, and non-human primates, evaluate competence, and how this influences their choice of cooperation partners.

The role of cognition applied to unpredictable content in the evolution of writing (UNPREDICTABLE) - Olivier Morin (IJN)

The appearance of writing was a turning point in the evolution of human communication and cognition; yet writing did not evolve independently in most human societies. For millennia, many societies only used specialised graphic codes representing specific types of information—personal emblems, numbers, calendric units, among others. In the societies that invented writing independently, the notation of speech sounds is preceded by such specialised notations, and is first used for telegraphic writing (encoding only some parts of speech), giving rise to full sentences notation only centuries later. This project attempts to describe this phenomenon systematically, to provide a cognitively plausible explanation for it, and to explore the broader implications of the underlying psychological mechanisms. We hypothesise that contextually unpredictable content is more likely to be encoded: we are more likely to explicitly say or write what cannot be guessed. We will test three hypotheses: (H1) some types of content are consistently more predictable than others, in a way that is to a certain extent robust to historical and cross-linguistic variations; (H2) people can detect unpredictable content and they ascribe cognitive value to it; (H3) the evolution of writing and other graphic codes should follow a sequence, with the invention and use of codes for highly unpredictable content (e.g. numerical quantities) occurring first, followed by the encoding of predictable content (e.g. articles or prepositions). The project is based on three different methodologies: Computational linguistic methods on big text corpora will test H1; H2 will be tested by conducting experiments to test whether participants detect unpredictable content types as such, and whether mentioning unpredictable content enhances the perceived value of explanations and arguments; we will test H3 through a systematic investigation of the evolution of graphic codes dedicated to various types of content.

L'unité de l'action humaine (UAH) - Denis Buehler (IJN)

Qu'est-ce que c'est, pour l'homme, que d'agir ? La réponse philosophique standard - la théorie causale de l'action - veut que l'action soit causée de manière constitutive par un état mental antécédent spécifique. Différentes versions de la théorie causale font appel à différentes causes mentales antécédentes pour unifier l'action : certaines font appel à une réflexion d'ordre supérieur, d'autres à des intentions, d'autres encore à des représentations sensorimotrices d'objectifs ou à l'affect. Mais si notre action peut certainement être causée par l'un ou l'autre de ces états mentaux, aucun d'entre eux n'est plausiblement à l'origine de toutes nos actions. La théorie de l'action suppose qu'il doit y avoir quelque chose qui constitue et unifie le type d'action, et donc toutes les actions. Si c'est le cas, il doit s'agir d'autre chose. Ce projet explore l'hypothèse selon laquelle, dans toutes les variétés de l'agence humaine, les individus orientent leurs activités vers un but, c'est-à-dire qu'ils coordonnent, intègrent et compensent les interférences avec leurs activités afin d'assurer la réalisation du but. Le projet vise à soutenir et à expliciter cette idée à l'aide de travaux empiriques sur le contrôle cognitif. Il soutient que ce qui unifie l'agence humaine, dans toutes ses variétés, est l'exercice d'une capacité primitive à guider qui est cons:tuée par le système exécutif central. Le noyau exécutif est un système de fonctions de contrôle cognitif, telles que la mémoire de travail, l'inhibition, le changement de tâche et d'autres, qui opère, au sein de la psychologie de l'individu, pour réguler les nombreux sous- systèmes de l'individu.