Under the founding Director of the Calleva Centre, Professor Jennifer Lau, work was conducted in a first series of projects which looked at a set of interconnected research questions, including:
- The effects of social context on adolescent and adult risk-taking behaviour, using experimental tasks to investigate the decisions that adolescents (and adults) make about risky situations, and how this is modulated by social context.
- Learning to look out for cheats. Here, the team were interested in examining whether people have cognitive biases for individuals who have defected in a social exchange. They extended this work to examine how cognitive biases for defectors might emerge through development, as adolescents’ social worlds become more complex.
- Navigating the social world: Higher-order mentalizing in adolescents. Humans are unique in their capacity to mentalize – that is, to think about others’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. This project involved adapting an existing measure of mentalizing ability to make it appropriate for adolescents and use it to examine both typical development of mentalizing through adolescence and how individual differences in adolescent mentalizing relate to social and emotional wellbeing.
- The development of interpersonal information integration. The team used social psychophysics to test how interpersonal information integration change with age.
- Detection of interpersonal cues encourages altruism. They investigated how the presence of interpersonal cues can elicit more generous patterns of behaviour from people, and whether individual differences in mood can enhance these effects further.
Publications:
- “Group decision-making is optimal in adolescence.” Haller S.P.W., Bang D., Bahrami B., Lau J.Y.F. Scientific Reports (2018) 8:15565. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-33557-x
- “Adolescent and adult risk-taking in virtual social contexts.” Haddad A.D., Harrison F., Norman T., Lau J.Y. Frontiers in Psychology (2014) 5:1476. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01476
- “Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in collective decision-making.” Bang D., Fusaroli R., Tylén K., Olsen K., Latham P.E., Lau J.Y., Roepstorff A., Rees G., Frith C.D., Bahrami B. Consciousness and Cognition (2014) 26:13-23. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.02.002
From 2014 two projects extended the Centre’s work further:
Professors Stuart West, Kevin Foster and Tom Norman investigated Cooperation and Conflict, since one of the greatest problems for the biological and social sciences is to explain cooperative social behaviours. Cooperation should in principle reduce the relative fitness of the cooperator and hence be selected against; but cooperation is common at all levels of life. Bacterial pathogens cooperate to overcome the immune response of their hosts, meerkats babysit the pups of other individuals, and ants live in complex social societies. Within humans, our underlying psychology, morality, institutions and societies are all based around cooperative interactions. This project exploited two systems that offer very different advantages for studying the evolution of cooperation: humans and bacteria. Humans offer excellent opportunities for studying how levels of cooperation are adjusted conditionally in response to local conditions, as well as a unique ability for examining the underlying mechanisms and motivations. Bacteria offer excellent opportunities for experimental evolution studies, since it is possible to study how cooperation evolves in different environmental and social conditions.
Publications:
- “Payoff-based learning best explains the rate of decline in cooperation across 237 public-goods games.” Burton-Chellew M.N., West S.A. Nature Human Behaviour (2021) 5:1330-1338. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01107-7
- “Bacteria Use Collective Behavior to Generate Diverse Combat Strategies.” Mavridou D.A.I., Gonzalez D., Kim W., West S.A., Foster K.R. Current Biology (2018) 28:345-355. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.030
- “Evidence for strategic cooperation in humans.” Burton-Chellew M.N., El Mouden C., West S.A.. Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences) (2017) 284:20170689. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0689
- “Social learning and the demise of costly cooperation in humans.” Burton-Chellew M.N., El Mouden C., West S.A.. Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences) (2017) 284:20170067. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0067
- “Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments.” Burton-Chellew M.N., El Mouden C., West S.A.. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. (2016) 113:1291-1296. doi:10.1073/pnas.1509740113
Professors Felix Budelmann, Robin Dunbar and Laurie Maguire investigated Adults at Play(s), to study the psychology of dramatic audiences. At the heart of this project was the notion of make-believe, which is psychologically puzzling: audiences know that what they see or read is fictional (the characters, the plot) but they respond to it emotionally as if it were real – a form of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This oddity raises psychological questions: what psychological mechanism(s) make(s) these seemingly contradictory mental states (knowing while pretending) possible? What benefit do audiences derive from this investment and engagement? At the same time a reciprocal literary question arises: how do dramatists manipulate the nature and the degree of the audience’s commitment to the transaction (‘I know this is not real but I temporarily behave as if it is’)? Adults at Play(s) explored the psychological and literary questions in tandem, with methodologies drawn from both psychology and the humanities and a focus on Greek and Shakespearean tragedy.
Publications:
- “How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval.” Teasdale B., Maguire L., Budelmann F., Dunbar R.I.M.. Frontiers in Psychololgy (2021) 12:762011. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.762011
- “Differential effects of film genre on viewers’ absorption, identification and enjoyment.” Thompson J.M, Teasdale B., Duncan S., van Emde Boas E., Budelmann F., Maguire L., Dunbar R.I.M. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2021) 15:697–709. doi:10.1037/aca0000353
- “Individual differences in transportation in narrative drama.” Thompson J.M, Teasdale B., Duncan S., van Emde Boas E., Budelmann F., Maguire L., Dunbar R.I.M. Review of General Psychology (2018) 22:210–219. doi:10.1037/gpr0000130
- “Cognition, endorphins, and the literary response to tragedy.” Budelman F., Dunbar R.I.M., Duncan S., van Emde Boas E., Maguire L., Teasdale B., Thompson J. The Cambridge Quarterly (2017) 46:229-250. doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfx016
- “Emotional arousal when watching drama increases pain threshold and social bonding.” Dunbar R.I.,. Teasdale B., Thompson J., Budelmann F., Duncan S., van Emde Boas E., Maguire L.. Royal Society Open Science (2016) 3:160288. doi:10.1098/rsos.160288
Since 2017 ten projects have been funded and one has been completed so far:
Dr Suzanne Schneider investigated Risk Frameworks and Human Security, to ask whether the language and logic of risk really makes us safe? The language and logic of risk has become pervasive in the twenty-first century. Criss-crossing the disparate realms of war and national security, healthcare, global finance, climate, and personal safety, risk operates at every scale; from online tools that calculate users’ propensity for heart disease to the predictive models used by hedge funds and the risk assessment matrices deployed by the U.S. military. However commonplace these practices have become, they are also of relatively recent vintage. Human life has never been without danger, but the idea that those hazards could be accurately identified and mitigated belongs to our own time; we should not take this framework for granted or assume that its ways of seeing and relating to the world are universally advantageous. Risk Frameworks and Human Security worked to de-naturalize risk and pose a number of questions related to the uses, and limitations, of risk frameworks as tools to organize social and political life. What structural forces—from computing power to geopolitical rivalries—propelled this development? How has the experience of risk evolved since the turn of the twenty-first century, against the backdrop of terrorism, financial crises and austerity, refugees and migration, climate catastrophe, and not least, a pandemic? And how might risk be managed in a democratic fashion, rather than—as has often been the case—merely offloaded to those with less power?
Outputs:
- A working group held at Magdalen College in June 2023
- Several publications forthcoming in 2024, including a special issue at the International Review of Applied Economics on ‘Risk, Uncertainty, and Democracy’. Manuscripts are welcome to be submitted here until 1 February 2024.