台大心理系

Culture plays a profound role in shaping our beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. While cultural values and beliefs live in each individual’s mind, their behavioral manifestations emerge through our interaction with others. In this talk, I will present several examples of how social interactions can be empirically studied in the laboratory. This work combines real-time interactions with computational techniques. First, I will demonstrate how I can develop a brain-based model of trust in the context of economic exchange and use construct validation to characterize the psychological processes associated with this construct of trust. Second, I will demonstrate how social interactions can have positive influences on health outcomes via socially transmitted beliefs. This work has important implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying healing clinical relationships. Finally, I will outline some of my future work that will develop computational models of culturally specific social preferences. This work will attempt to quantify key ways in which culture can impact our social relations. Across these studies, I hope to show how an interdisciplinary approach, combining experimental social psychology and computational methods can help to gain a better understanding of culture through real-time social interactions.