Yuan Meng

Title: Can rational inference about the sampling process explain the reproduction of inequality? 
Abstract:Does awareness of inequality automatically motivate people to rectify it? Or might they justify inequality and reproduce it when they can? Past studies (e.g., Hetey & Eberhardt, 2018) often use pre-existing stereotypes (“Blacks-crime” association) to explain the latter. In this on-going work, we are exploring whether rational inferences about the sampling process (e.g., “Police officers are knowledgeable about crime rates in different races and maximize their utilities when deciding whether to stop people.”) alone may reproduce disparities. To strip away prior assumptions about groups, we created a novel arcade game, “The Golden Ticket”. In this game, robot chicken lay eggs that may or may not have a golden ticket; buying an egg is costly. Participants watched the best players buying or forgoing eggs from each chicken and were asked to infer the true “hit rate” of that chicken. In this talk, I will show results from two experiments with adults and compare participants’ responses against computational models with different assumptions about the sampling process (e.g., players chose randomly, players tried to maximize utilities, etc.).

Rebecca Zhu
 

Title: What mechanisms underlie early word learning? Evidence from toddlers in rural Kenya
Abstract: How do humans learn words in the first few years of life? Preissler & Carey (2004) show that by 18 months, infants possess rich theoretical expectations that words and pictures to refer, rather than merely associate. However, there is little empirical data addressing how these referential expectations emerge in development. One hypothesis is that infants require frequent experience associating visual symbols (i.e. picture books) with real-world objects in order to build the richer expectation that words and pictures refer. We test this hypothesis by examining whether toddlers in rural Western Kenya, who have less experience with visual symbols, possess the same referential expectations as U.S. toddlers.