[Invited Lecture] 

Cultural Evolutionary Mismatches in Response to Collective Threat

Speaker：Michele Gelfand（Stanford University）

Across the millennia, human groups have evolved specific cultural and psychological adaptations to cope with collective threats, from terrorism to natural disasters to pathogens. In particular, cultural tightness, characterized by strict social norms and punishments, as one key adaptation that helps groups coordinate to survive collective threats. However, interferences with threat signals that facilitate tightening can lead to cultural mismatches—either too much or not enough tightening. I discuss two examples of cultural mismatches: the COVID-19 pandemic (a case in which collective threat is real, but there is a resistance to tightening) and the rise of populist movements (a case in which exaggerated threat leads to unnecessary tightening), and highlight theoretical and practical implications of cultural mismatch theory. 

 

Her bio: Michele Gelfand is the John H. Scully Professor of Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business School and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the Past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, and she is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

[Special Lecture] 

Cognitive Neural Development of Meaning in Typical Children and Children with Autism

Speaker：Tai-Li Chou（National Taiwan University）

Obtaining meaning and using it for communication is crucial in our daily lives. Such mental operation can be revealed by studying language development and deficits. My talk targets two populations, including typically developing children for language development and children with autism for language deficits. I take a cognitive neural approach to examine the nature of organization and processing of language knowledge. Three sets of studies will be introduced to understand the cultural differences between Chinese and English typical children, the developmental changes in organization and processing in children, and potential therapy to treat children with autism. These findings are summarized to account for dynamic interaction in the cognitive neural mechanisms of meaning.

The work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a conflict of interest.

 

Biography: Tai-Li Chou received his BA and MS in psychology from National Taiwan University. He also received a PhD in cognition and brain sciences from Cambridge University, working on comparisons of reading alphabetic and logographic scripts with William Marslen-Wilson and Karalyn Patterson. Then he went to Northwestern University to do his post-doc training on neural development of language processing with James Booth. He is currently a professor of psychology at National Taiwan University. He was also a research fellow based at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His work uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural bases and development of language.