Meet YINS, 3/4/15: "March Madness and the Office Pool" and "The Psychology of Social Network Transmission: Which Kinds of Contagion Are Unique to Humans?"

Meet YINS, 3/4/15: "March Madness and the Office Pool" and "The Psychology of Social Network Transmission: Which Kinds of Contagion Are Unique to Humans?"

Talk Summary: 

“March Madness and the Office Pool:” March brings March Madness, the annual single elimination basketball tournament showcasing the best college teams in the country. Almost as mad are office pools. We describe the structure of single elimination tournaments, and show how to “fill in the brackets” to maximize the expected number of points in a pool. (Joint work with Stan Garstka, Yale School of Management)

“The Psychology of Social Network Transmission: Which Kinds of Contagion Are Unique to Humans?:” Professor Santos will discuss what recent work in comparative cognition suggests about the kinds of social transmission mechanism that might be uniquely human. She will focus on recent studies examining belief transmission, making the case that humans might have a special mechanism to take on the beliefs of others.

Speaker: 
Edward Kaplan & Laurie Santos
Edward Kaplan: William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Science at the Yale School of Management, Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Medicine, and Professor of Engineering in the Yale Faculty of Engineering. Laurie Santos: Associate Professor in the Yale Department of Psychology, Director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale
Bio: 

Currently, Professor Kaplan’s research is dominated by what he calls counter-terror operations research—evaluating the effectiveness of suicide bomber detector schemes, or estimating the size of a terror threat on the basis of how busy undercover agents are. This follows many years of working on HIV and AIDS, including methods for estimating the number of new infections, and in some ways there are commonalities. Both are variations on the problem of estimating the size of a hidden population.

Professor Santos’s research explores an age-old question: what makes the human mind unique? She this question by studying the cognitive capacities of non-human animals. By comparing the cognitive abilities of non-human animals to those of humans, which domains of knowledge are unique to the human mind can be determined.