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SUMMARY:What kind of political animal is Homo sapiens? - Dr. Lee De-Wit\, 
 University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20221020T170000Z
DTEND:20221020T180000Z
UID:TALK184046@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Robert Asher
DESCRIPTION:Attendance is free but please register to attend: \nhttps://ww
 w.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/news-events/events/natsci-lecture-2022/\n\nRecent tur
 bulent events in western democracies have resurfaced questions of whether 
 humans are fundamentally too tribal and too irrational for democracy to wo
 rk. Plato famously questioned the ability of an electorate to meaningfully
  judge the competence of a leader from their outward appearance. The last 
 few decades have given more substance to those concerns with the scientifi
 c study of “psychological biases”\, fuelling concerns that voting beha
 viour is driven by a basket of biases. Perhaps one of the most consistent 
 lines of critique here pertains to climate change\, and the fact that we h
 ave a “present bias” and prioritise the present over the future. I wil
 l argue however that it can be misleading and damaging to frame failures o
 f politics (such as the massive misinformation campaign from certain fossi
 l fuel companies in the US) as a failure of human psychology. Indeed dismi
 ssing people you disagree with as an irrational “herd” is itself a dam
 aging feature of democratic discourse. There are however certainly evolved
  features of our psychology\, such as the way children learn social norms\
 , or the way in which people infer motives or misperceive others intention
 s that we need to understand better if we are to design democratic systems
  that are better suited to work with the grain of human psychology.
LOCATION:Graham Storey Room\, Trinity Hall
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