Friday 9 January 2015

Visiting speaker: Peter Hegarty, University of Surrey

Date and time: Thursday Jan 15, 12pm

Room: HG09


Title: On the failure to develop the hypothesis that White people are White.

Abstract:  Category norms are implicit default assumptions about members of categories that rarely capture attention such as the assumption that humans have one and only one head.  Unfortunately the identities of higher status groups, such as men, White people, the rich, and heterosexuals often stand in as category norms in our thinking.  In this talk I will first review a body of work on how category norms affect explanations of group differences.   Next I will present new work showing how category norms can inhibit the generation of hypotheses from data.  I will conclude with consideration of what we should and shouldn't do manage the effects of implicit norms on our scientific data about real social groups.

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