EFTA01089440.pdf

\,,CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Nalini Ambady Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Stanford University Nalini Ambady is a Professor of social psychology at Stanford University. She is an expert in the area of person perception and nonverbal communication. Much ofher research has focused on the accuracy of judgments from "thin slices" of behavior. She is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (1999), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Behavioral Science Research Award (1993), as well as several awards for teaching and mentoring. Her work has been featured in several national and international media reports and television and radio programs. Summary of work on the accuracy of judgments How do we glean information about others? How accurate are the judgments we make about others from fleeting glimpses or "thin slices" of their behavior? How do our own mental states influence such judgments? How do cultural exposure and experience shape our judgments? What are the neural correlates underlying thin-slicing? What traits can be judged accurately? These are some of the questions we have been exploring in my lab for the last 20 years. We've examined a variety of thin-slice judgments, including judgments of teachers, doctors, managers, politicians, and, most recently, Facebook pages. Such judgments can sometimes be unexpectedly accurate, but accuracy is nuanced by factors such as exposure, expertise, sociocultural contexts and mental states. EFTA01089440  CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Max Bazerman Ph.D. Jesse Isidor Straus Professor, Harvard Business School Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School. In addition, Max is formally affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Psychology Department, and the Program on Negotiation. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of eighteen books (includingBlind Spots [with Ann Tenbrunsel], Princeton University Press and Negotiation Genius [with Deepak Malhotra], Bantam Books, September 2007) and over 200 research articles and chapters. Max's recent awards include a 2006 honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), being named as one of Ethisphere's 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics, one ofDaily Kos' Heroes from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco trial, and the 2008 Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management. Details at www.people.hbs.eduimbazerman Summary of work on Bounded Ethicality Which option do you prefer? If you die in an accident, your heart and other organs will be used to save other lives. In addition, if you ever need an organ transplant, there will be a 90 percent chance that you will get the transplant. If you die in an accident, you will be buried with your heart and other organs in your body and other lives that could have been saved will not be. In addition, if you ever need an organ transplant, there will be a 45 percent chance that you will get the transplant. Most of us have a reflective preference for Option A. That's a good thing, because Option A could save up to 6,000 lives per year in the United States alone—roughly twice as many people than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Yet, collectively, the United States opts for an organ donation policy that looks more like Option B. Why? Policymakers fall victim to the moral rule of "do no harm"; as a result, thousands of citizens needlessly die each year. That is, in the United States, if you die in an accident, and have made no explicit decision about your organs, you will be buried (or cremated) with your organs—an opt-in system. In contrast, in many nations, if you make no explicit decision about organ donation, your organs are available for donation to others—an opt-out system. In both cases, you have the choice, assuming you stop, think about it, and fill out the right form accordingly. But the default option for those who don't go through this effort is different. In the United States, policy has resulted in Option B as the default and hence the most chosen option, in marked contrast to the option most people prefer, Option A. My work argues that, as in the example above, we often fail to mind our gap between our reflective preferences and our actual behavior. While there may be people who will always oppose organ donation, ow focus is on the plethora of wise, ethical citizens, legislators, and leaders who would prefer Option A, yet are comfortable watching our nation continue to fall back on Option B. More broadly, my work explores the gap between our ethical preferences and our actions as individuals, organizations, and society. My work highlights how our actions are often at odds with our more reflective preferences. I will introduce the core concept of bounded ethicality, which is rooted in psychologist Herbert Simon's groundbreaking concept of bounded rationality, a framework that describes the systematic, predictable, and biased psychological processes that contribute to the gap between our true preferences and our behavior. Bounded ethicality leads to behavior that is widely viewed as unethical and is inconsistent with the decision maker's values. EFTA01089441  CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Colin F. Camerer Ph.D. Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology Colin F. Camera is the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1981 and worked at Northwestern, Penn, and Chicago before joining Caltech. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and wrote or co-edited four books, including Behavioral Game Theory (Princeton Press, 2003). Camerer's research group is interested in the psychological and neural basis of choice, strategizing in games, and trading in markets. Recent neuroeconomic fMR1 projects involve self-control in choosing tempting foods, why people like longshots and lottery tickets, curiosity, choice overload, and the contrast between hypothetical and real choices. Research on the cognitive hierarchy of strategic thinking Analyses of strategic thinking using game typically assume a hyper-rational and emotionless Mr. Spock-like person who considers every option. Behavioral game theory focuses on normal people and organizations who take shortcuts, don't think through all the consequences of actions, learn by trial-and-error, and do not completely figure out what competitors and partners are likely to think, feel and do. One useful mathematical approach in behavioral game theory is to assume that there is a cognitive hierarchy (CH) of steps of strategic thinking. Intuitive 0-level thinkers choose based on quick hunches (lucky numbers, what worked in the past, or what others recommend). Level-1 strategic thinkers think others are intuitive and react optimally to what they think intuitive choosers will do. Level-2 thinkers go a step further, anticipating what level-1 and level-0 thinkers will do. The CH approach explains a lot of the variety of behavior in many different laboratory experiments, on games involving competition, coordination given common interests, and games with hidden information (with bluffing). This model has also been used to analyze choices in Swedish lotteries, and the market consequences of the increasing tendency for movie studios to withhold mediocre movies from film critics before they are released. Details of strategic thinking are also being seen in fMR1 scans of brain activity when subjects play simple competitive and bluffing games for money. The CH approach also provides a language in which to understand psychiatric disorders as malfunction of normal social value forecasts or computations (as in autism, social anxiety disorders, and antisocial personality disorder). EFTA01089442  \„,,CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Laura L Carstensen Ph.D. Professor of Psychology and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity Laura Carstensen is Professor of Psychology and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy at Stanford University, where she is also the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, an interdisciplinary research center that explores innovative ways to solve the problems of people over 50 while improving quality of life at all ages. She is best known for socioemotional selectivity theory, which addresses the links between motivation and time horizons. Her research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging for more than 20 years and is currently funded through a MERIT award. Laura has chaired two studies for the National Academy of Sciences, resulting in The AgingMind and When I M 64. She has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Distinguished Career Award from the Gerontological Society of America; earlier this year she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leuven. She is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on an Aging Society. Carstensen received her BS from the University of Rochester and PhD in clinical psychology from West Virginia University. Research statement: We are approaching a watershed moment in human history. By 2015, the number of people over 65 in the U.S. will surpass the number children under 15; and by the time our children reach old age, living to 100 will be commonplace. Mostly, discussions about aging at the individual and societal levels are fraught with concern. True enough, there are major challenges associated with this dramatic increase in life expectancy. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that long life presents unprecedented opportunities. The sudden extension of life expectancy outpaced the ability of culture to accommodate longer lives. By culture, I refer broadly to the crucible that holds science, technology and behavioral practices. The societies we live in today were literally built by and for young people. Medical science searches for cures to acute diseases more than chronic diseases that develop slowly over decades. Employers reward workers for agility and speed. Trains, automobiles and airports tacitly are designed for young users. Even hospitals are difficult to navigate if users are in any way functionally disabled. Social norms that guide us through life, telling us when to get an education, many, work and retire evolved around lives halfas long. The demographic changes unfolding will reshape every aspect of life as we know it. At this point in time, individuals are worried and policy makers are bracing for an inevitable crisis. Science and technology offer an alternative: design a world where the majority of people arrive at old age mentally sharp, physically fit and financially secure. To this end, we need to develop "longevity science" an interdisciplinary science that addresses practical problems of long-lived people and finds solutions that improve quality of life at all ages. It is essential that we focus not only on age-related decline, but also identify strengths of older citizens. My own research focuses on age differences in motivation and aspects of development that may improve across adulthood. Although there are aspects of cognitive and physical functioning that decline with age, knowledge grows and emotional stability improves. People come to be more selective in their focus, but increasingly invested in activities that are most meaningful to them. Indeed, societies with large numbers of mature, emotionally stable, citizens, whose childrearing years are behind them, and who care deeply about the world around them can be better societies than we have ever known. At the Stanford Center on Longevity, I work with teams of scientists, including engineers, social scientists, physicians, and educators, to advance and rapidly disseminate science that can form the basis of a culture that supports long life. Our aim is to apply science and technology to the problems of aging, identify unique strengths ofolder people and join forces with policy makers and leaders in business and communities to use this knowledge to improve quality oflife at all ages. EFTA01089443  \,,CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Carol S. Dweck Ph.D. Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor at Stanford University Carol S. Dweck. Ph.D.. is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Her research focuses on why people succeed and how to foster their success. More specifically, her work has demonstrated the role of mindsets in success and has shown how praise for intelligence can undermine motivation and learning. She has also held professorships at Columbia and Harvard Universities, has lectured to education, business, and sports groups all over the world, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Academy of Sciences, and has won the Distinguished Scientific Contribution award from the American Psychological Association. Her work has been prominently featured in the news and her bestselling book Mindser (published by Random House) has been widely acclaimed and has been translated into 20 languages. My work has shown that people's mindsets about their abilities (whether they see them as fixed traits or as qualities that can be developed) can have a profound impact. Those who believe their intelligence and talents can be developed take on more challenges, bounce back from setbacks, and often achieve more—and when people are taught this "growth mindset" their resilience and achievement are boosted. These issues are important for business, particularly in this economic climate, in which challenges and setbacks are inevitable, and in which the constant growth of abilities is imperative. We have shown that different ways of giving feedback can promote different mindsets--praising intelligence backfires by creating a fixed mindset. Research has also demonstrated how quickly people can absorb these mindsets from organizations in ways that affect their values and behavior, and how changing business managers' mindsets affects their effectiveness with their employees. We've taken this research in many new and exciting directions, such as conflict resolution. We have now used the mindset framework with Palestinians and Jewish Israelis to significantly improve their attitudes toward each other and their willingness to compromise for peace. EFTA01089444  \,,CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science James H. Fowler Ph.D. Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science, U.C. San Diego James H. Fowler earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 2003 and is currently Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His work lies at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, with a focus on social networks, behavioral economics, evolutionary game theory, political participation, cooperation, and genopolitics. James was recently named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, one ofForeign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Most Original Thinker of the year by The McLaughlin Group. His research has been featured in numerous best-of lists includingNew York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas, Time's Year in Medicine, Discover Magazine's Year in Science, and HarvardBusiness Review's Breakthrough Business Ideas. Together with Nicholas Christakis, James wrote a book on social networks for a general audience called Connected. Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award, it has been translated into twenty languages, named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review, and featured in Wired, Oprah's Reading Guide, Business Week's Best Books of the Year, and a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Summary, of work on social networks James' research on social networks is wide-ranging, but the most notable work has involved the creation of a large network dataset in the Framingham Heart Study that includes more than 12,000 people and spans 32 years. He and his collaborator Nicholas Christakis at Harvard Medical School developed and analyzed the network data starting in 2004, and after three years they published their first article in the New England Journal ofMedicine. This paper provided evidence for the spread of obesity from person to person in the social network, in clusters that extend up to 3 degrees of separation (to a friend's friend's friend). Since then they have published articles on similar dynamics in the spread of smoking, drinking, aspirin use, depression, happiness, and loneliness in the Framingham Heart Study, and obesity, marijuana use, and sleep behavior in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. They have also published experimental studies, like one that shows generosity spreads to 3 degrees, and James has created large political science data sets and applied network methods to the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, and even political scientists, themselves! He and Christakis describe the breadth of this research on social networks in a book for general audiences called Connected. James has also been actively investigating social preferences and the evolution of cooperation. He has published evolutionary game theory articles on cooperation, altruistic punishment, and the evolution of overconfidence. He has also published behavioral economic studies of other-regarding preferences like egalitarianism. He has connected these ideas to political behavior, as well, showing for example that altruists are more likely to vote and that people who join political parties exhibit what evolutionary game theorists call "strong reciprocity" (they cooperate with others and punish those who don't). And in his most recent work, he shows that the social networks of hunter-gatherers look much like modern ones, and their giving behavior in public goods games is correlated between connected individuals, helping to explain how altruists can survive over time. James' research on social preferences led to his exploration of the genetic and neural basis for these behaviors. For example, he has conducted several studies showing that genetic variation contributes to variation in turnout and political participation. He also joined forces with a group in Sweden to show that genes contribute to variation in cooperative behavior in economics experiments. Since then, he has published several articles that identify specific genes associated with political behaviors and attitudes. More recently James has been applying ideas from behavior genetics to the study of social networks. In a pair of recent articles, he shows that genetic variation contributes to variation in network structure, and specific genotypes show signs of both positive and negative correlation between socially connected people. As should be apparent, James's work lies at the intersection of the natural and social sciences, and as a result he frequently advocates the crossing of disciplinary boundaries. He has argued that biologists and political scientists must work together if we want to better understand politics and what makes human beings unique as a species. He has also argued that social science will be completely transformed in the 21st century by our ability to collect and analyze massive datasets that are passively collected (the massive/passive revolution). He is currently working directly with Facebook on several papers that seek to explain planetary-scale behavioral phenomena. EFTA01089445  CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Daniel Gilbert Ph.D. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University Daniel Gilbert is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching, including the American Psychological Association's DistinguishedSelena* Awardfor an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His 2007 book, Stumbling on Happiness, spent 6 months on the New York Times bestseller list, has being translated into 30 languages, and was awarded the Royal Society's GeneralBook Prize for best science book of the year. In 2010, he hosted and co-wrote the award-winning NOVA television series This EmotionalLife which was seen by more than 10 million viewers. He is a frequent contributor to Time, The New York Times, and NPR's All Things Considered, and has been a guest on numerous television shows including The Today Show, Charlie Rose, 20/20, and The Colbert Report. Summary of Work All animals learn from experience, but experience can be expensive. A mouse will learn a lot from its encounter with a cat, but only if it survives. Wouldn't it be great if there were some way to learn from experience without actually having to have it? Wouldn't it be great it if we could somehow learn from mistakes without making them? Yes it would and yes it is. Because unlike all other animals, human beings are able to have experiences simply by simulating them in their minds. We all know that chocolate tastes better with cinnamon than with garlic, that it would be painful to go an hour without blinking or a day without sitting, that winning the lottery would be more enjoyable than becoming paraplegic—and we know these things not because they've happened to us in the past, but because we can close our eyes and imagine these events happening to us in the future. As a result, we can learn which things to approach and which to avoid without risking life or limb. Mental simulation is an amazing and uniquely human ability, but as it turns out, the lessons we learn from it are not always right. Trysts are often better when contemplated than consummated, and sweetbreads are often better the other way around. For the last fifteen years, my research has focused on understanding how and how well people can mentally simulate their reactions to future events. We've discovered that people make a fundamental error—namely, they overestimate the magnitude and duration of their future pains and pleasures—and that this error is caused by four general features ofmental simulation. Our work has also shown that there is a simple way to avoid making these errors, and that people generally refuse to believe it. EFTA01089446  CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Malcolm Gladwell Author and a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of four books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), and Outliers: The Story ofSuccess (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, What the Dog Saw (2009) is a compilation of stories published in The New Yorker. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City. EFTA01089447  \CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Joshua D. Greene Ph.D. John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and the director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Harvard University Joshua D. Greene is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and the director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory, Department ofPsychology, Harvard University. His primary research interest is the psychological and neuroscientific study of moral judgment, focusing on the interplay between emotion and reasoning in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes ofHealth, and the MacArthur Foundation. His publications have appeared in Science, the Proceedings ofthe National Academy of Sciences USA, Neuron, Cognition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ofLondon. He is currently writing a book about the philosophical implications of our emerging scientific understanding of morality. Summary of work "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." This line—which is widely, but probably falsely, attributed to Joseph Stalin—captures a deep truth about moral psychology. We care about others, but as the number of others rises, our moral sensitivities are dulled. Why is that? Amitai Shenhav and I recently conducted an experiment that hints at an answer. We scanned people's brains as they responded to a series of "rescue dilemmas." For example, in one case, you're driving a rescue boat, headed toward a drowning man, when you receive a distress signal telling you that a boat in the opposite direction has capsized. Stay on course, and you'll definitely save the man up ahead. But if you reverse course, you could save a larger group of people. Should you change course? Your answer will likely depend on at least two factors. First, how many people might you save by changing course? Second, what are your odds of actually saving them? If you've a 95% chance of saving 40 people, you'll likely change course. If you've a 5% chance of saving 2 people, you'll likely keep going. In our experiment, we systematically varied the number of lives at stake (the magnitude) and the odds ofsaving them (the probability). Our experiment was modeled on earlier experiments involving economic gambles: Will you choose a smaller, guaranteed reward (e.g. $10), or take a chance on a larger, uncertain reward (e.g. a 30% chance at $50)? Researchers have conducted similar experiments with primates and other mammals using food rewards. We found that, from a neuroscientific perspective, these moral decisions look a lot like standard economic decisions. In both cases, a brain region called the anterior insula keeps track of outcome probability; the ventral striatum keeps track of outcome magnitude; and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex integrates information about probability and magnitude to compute something like "expected value." These neural circuits didn't evolve for thinking about life-and-death decisions involving strangers. Rather, they evolved for things like foraging for food. This may explain why "a million deaths is a statistic." For a foraging ape, diminishing returns kick in quickly. The more food one has, the less additional food is worth. And without freezers and padlocks, a year's supply of food is worth little more than a day's. Thus, the neural circuitry that we use for evaluating tradeoffs may have a principle of diminishing returns built in. This makes sense for putting a neural price on things like fruit and meat. But does it make sense for human lives? Why should the hundredth life, or the millionth life, that one saves be worth any less than the first? At the policy level, relying on ow gut feelings to navigate complex tradeoffs may not work. To think well about big social problems— from healthcare reform to global warming—we and our elected representatives may have to put our gut feelings aside and think more like policy wonks. This example concerns the influence of core, mammalian valuation mechanisms on moral thinking. My research, more generally, aims to understand moral judgment as the product of diverse cognitive sub-systems with distinctive strengths and weaknesses. EFTA01089448  CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Eszter Hargittai Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Communication Studies Northwestern University Harginai's research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how people from different backgrounds adopt and use the Internet in varying ways. She has developed methods to study people's Web-use skills and explores how digital literacy influences what people do online. Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. She is also Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society where she spent the 2008/09 academic year in residence. Earlier, she was a Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. She has published over 60 papers and has given over 120 invited presentations and over 70 conference talks on how people from varying backgrounds incorporate digital media into their everyday lives. She is editor of Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have (University of Michigan Press 2009). Her work has received awards from the American Sociological Association, the Eastem Sociological Society, the National Communication Association and the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. In 2010, the International Communication Association selected her to receive its Outstanding Young Scholar Award. For more information, see eszter.com and webuse.org. Current Research Variation in Internet Skill and Online Behavior across the Population Many of the questions being asked about whether or how digital media are changing our world and our lives assume universal outcomes across population segments. Many inquiries tend to take for granted that there is one overarching answer that applies to all cases. Questions such as "What are the Internet's political implications?", "Are digital media democratizing the public sphere?", "How are new media changing cultural consumption?", "What is the relationship between playing video games and one's health?", "How does one's online presence influence one's job prospects?" often disregard that the answers may not apply uniformly across different population segments. Hargittai's work has shown that users' background such as their gender, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status are systematically related to what online communities people join, how skilled people are with using the Internet, and how people spend their time online. Given persisting inequality in online engagement across population groups, research on a myriad of topics must be conscious of online disparities in order to avoid drawing mistaken conclusions about how digital media are influencing different people's everyday lives. The Promises and Perils of Online Data Opportunities Increasingly scholars and others are turning to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as gaming sites like World of Warcraft as data sources for addressing questions about human behavior. While the automatically generated logs from such sites offer a wealth of data, they also come with notable shortcomings. Given that uptake of sites is not randomly distributed across the population, relying on specific sites as data sources poses challenges when trying to generalize findings to a population broader than certain users of a particular system. Depending on the questions of interest, researchers must make sure that the study design they employ is not intertwined with their substantive questions of interest. This is crucial for avoiding the systematic exclusion of certain populations from findings and thus walking away with flawed conclusions. EFTA01089449  \CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science David I. Laibson Ph.D. Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics, Harvard University David Laibson is the Robert I. Goldman Professor ofEconomics at Harvard University. Laibson is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is Research Associate in the Asset Pricing, Economic Fluctuations, and Aging Working Groups. Laibson serves on several editorial boards, as well as the boards of the Health and Retirement Survey and the Pension Research Council. Laibson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. He is a recipient of the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. Research Activities Almost all important decisions involve intertemporal tradeoffs. Many of society's greatest challenges involve self-defeating decisions in which people choose current rewards that come at a disproportionately large delayed cost: examples include dropping out of high school, smoking cigarettes, exercising too link. saving too little, and failing to take prescribed medications. In most of these cases the individual characterizes her own behavior as unsatisfactory and suboptimal. I use a mix of laboratory, neuroimaging, and field methods to understand the reasons that we frequently make self-defeating intertemporal choices. I am particularly interested in measuring and modeling the phenomenon of present bias (aka quasi-hyperbolic discounting), which provides one account ofour tendency to prioritize present over future pleasures. I also study interventions — nudges in the language of behavioral economics -- that enable people to align their good intentions (e.g., get a flu shot next fall) with their actions. Three sets of interventions have proven to be highly efficacious across multiple behavioral domains: defaults (putting people in a desirable outcome and giving them the option to opt out), active choice (requiring that people actively choose, thereby preventing procrastination and passivity), and simplified choice (making choices easy and less time-consuming). I also study the ways that firms attempt to exploit consumers' idiosyncratic behaviors, especially by shrouding the true costs of the products that they sell. EFTA01089450  CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Robert W. Levenson Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Institute for Personality and Social Research Robert W. Levenson received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in clinical psychology. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California—Berkeley where he is a member of the behavioral neuroscience, clinical science, developmental, and social/personality programs. He currently serves as Director of the Institute for Personality and Social Research and Director of the Clinical Science Program. His research program is in the area ofhuman emotion, studying the organization of physiological, behavioral and subjective systems; the ways that these systems are impacted by neuropathology, normal aging, and culture; and the role that emotions play in the maintenance and disruption of committed relationships. Dr. Levenson's research is supported by NIMH and NIA (including a recent MERIT award). He is past President of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and past President of the Association for Psychological Science. Summary of work on emotion and aging Robert W. Levenson studies the mind-body relationship, focusing on the interplay between psychological and physiological processes. Much ofhis work focuses on the nature ofhuman emotion, including its physiological manifestations; the variations in emotion that are associated with age, gender, culture, and neuropathology; and the role that emotion plays in interpersonal interactions. Dr. Levenson's current work is focused primarily on two major projects: a study ofhow our emotional lives change with normal aging and a study of the impact of neurodegenerative diseases on emotional functioning, Emotion and Aging The centerpiece of this work has been an ongoing longitudinal study of a large sample of long-term first marriages in middle and old age. This work uses an observational methodology in which couples come to the laboratory and engage in naturalistic discussions about important topics related to their relationship. These interactions are studied to determine if there are signs in emotional experience, behavior, language, and physiology that can be used to discrim-inate between the interactions of couples who are satisfied and dissatisfied with their relationships, to discriminate between couples at different stages of the life span, and to predict what will happen to the level ofcouples' relationship satisfaction over time. Couples are studied as they progress through prototypical later-life transitions (children leaving home for middle-aged couples, retirement and health changes for older couples), trying to determine what kinds of couples fare well as they cope with these transitions and what kinds of couples fare poorly. The other focus of this work is to learn about normative changes in emotion that occur with age. Here, emotional reactivity, emotional regulation, and emotional empathy are assessed in the laboratory in participants at different ages to determine how human emotions change as we age. Unlike many other aspects ofhuman functioning which show pronounced declines with age (e.g., memory, psychomotor skills), many aspects of emotional functioningappear to be relatively spared as we age, and some even show signs of improve-ment and positive development in late life. Two new directions in this work examine the sources of individual differences in emotional functioning(focusing on the role of genetics and of changes in cognitive abilities) and the consequences of these individual differences for well-being, health, and successful aging. Emotion In Neurodegenerative Disorders In these studies, we are examining the ways that emotion, personality, language, and social behavior are altered in the early stages of brain diseases and injuries (frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and orbitofrontal brain lesions). Of particular interest are those patients who show neural loss in brain areas thought to be critical to emotional functioning. This work builds upon our extensive prior work studying normal emotional pro-cesses in late life, which enables us to detect subtle changes in the emotion system that are associated with the onset and course of neuropathology. This research is being conducted in collaboration with a group ofneurologists at UCSF and is currently being expanded to include a component devoted to studying family caregivers of dementia patients. Other research Over the years, Dr. Levenson's work has examined a number of other topics related to human emotion. These have included: (a) the influence of culture on emotion, including studies of ethnic groups in the US and field studies in West Sumatra; (b) the role of emotion in same-sex couples; (c) the influence of meditation on emotional functioning; and (d) genetic influences on emotional functioning. EFTA01089451  ....,CASBS Summit 2012 Where Social Meets Science Elizabeth F. Loftus Ph.D. Distinguished Professor, U. C. Irvine Elizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She holds faculty positions in three departments (Psychology & Social Behavior; Criminology, Law & Society; and Cognitive Sciences), and in the School of Law. Since receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University, she has published 22 books (including the award winning Eyewitness Testimony) and 500 scientific articles. Loftus's research of the last 30 years has focused on the malleability of human memory. She has been recognized for this research with six honorary doctorates (from universities in the U.S., Norway, the Netherlands, Israel, and Britain), and election to the National Academy of Sciences. She is past president of the Association for Psychological Science. Perhaps one of the most unusual signs of recognition appeared in the Review of General Psychology, which identified the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Not surprisingly Freud, Skinner, and Piaget were at the top of that list. Loftus was 458, and the top ranked woman on the list. Summary of work on malleable memory My scholarly contributions helped to change professional and public conceptions of human memory, and led to a deepening appreciation of the malleability of memory. My earliest studies demonstrated that innocuous procedures could alter memories ofpast events. Some of the more widely known findings were produced in the mid and late 1970s, starting with an experiment in which witnesses to an event were later interviewed with questions that insinuated novel (and incorrect) information into the memory record of the event. For example, after witnessing a slide show depicting an auto accident, the question "Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was at the stop sign?" might lead an interviewee who had seen a yield sign later to recall having seen a stop sign at the intersection. This was the modest empirical beginning of a research program that has helped to shift the way in which both scientists and educated laypersons understand the functioning of human memory. In the current view (to which my research pointed), memory is no longer likened to a faithful, permanent recording device such as a camera or tape recorder. Rather, a more apt metaphor for the contemporary view is the rewritable memory of a computer. Further, with the aid ofmy research contributions, it is now well understood that the rewriting of memory can be precipitated by external agents, much as a worm or virus can precipitate changes in the computer's memory. I have published hundreds of empirical articles and chapters on the malleability ofmemory, documenting the boundary conditions and individual differences variables that are associated with such distortions. The basic phenomenon ofreduced memory after exposure to misleading information is now known as the "misinformation effect." Not long after conceiving and starting to pursue this research program on the malleability of memory, I realized that this work had implications that called for consideration well beyond the covers ofscholarly journals. The alterations ofmemory that I demonstrated in the laboratory had potential counterparts in criminal investigations, in which carelessly worded questioning by police and prosecutors might modify witnesses'