In this webinar, Jay Van Bavel will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggesting that humans are deeply sensitive to group contexts and that their group-identities shape a wide range of cognitive processes. The first part of his talk will examine the influence of group membership and collective identification on person perception and automatic evaluation. The second part of his talk will examine the influence of group membership on mind perception. The third part of his talk will examine the influence of group membership on more basic aspects of perception (i.e., distance estimation and olfaction). Taken together, this research suggests that group contexts exert a profound influence on human cognition.

About the speaker:

Jay Van Bavel (PhD University of Toronto) is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. Dr. Van Bavel has published over 30 academic papers in some of the top journals in psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Psychological Science, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Emotion, Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience). His research has been cited in more than 850 scholarly papers and has been covered in several international media outlets, including Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, The Daily Telegraph, CBC News, Women’s Health, and Salon. He is currently writing a book, entitled An Introduction to Social Neuroscience.