Two Minds and Perception

This video describes a study where people were asked to give an opinion, then to explain their thinking. But in some cases the researcher presented them with information that was the opposite of what they had said. Most people didn't notice the switch, and they then gave reasonable explanations for something that they didn't actually believe! This study shows the difference between intutive-level decision making in the moment, and narratives that explain or justify behavior later on.

Special thanks to our colleague Dr. Priscilla Nodine at the CU College of Nursing for suggesting this TED Talk.

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Chatbot Changes and Challenges in 2023

I wrote last summer about artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly able to approximate human speech in free-form conversations. These tools then burst onto the public stage with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT at the end of November last year. As you probably know by now, the acronym "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer," which highlights the three most important aspects of this technology: (1) it generates novel responses that aren't based on an a specific algorithm or decision rule, but instead rely on pattern recognition; (2) it has been pre-trained by consuming massive amounts of writing from the Internet -- much more than a human could read in several lifetimes; and (3) it transforms those prior writing samples using a trial-and-error process that predicts the next phrase in a sequence until it has come up with a response that seems intelligible to humans. ChatGPT works much like the auto-complete feature in your email or ...

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Robot football players at a Valparaiso University College of Engineering event I have been thinking lately about robots, which creates an interesting asymmetry: They almost certainly have not been thinking about me. Nevertheless, I find that I often respond to robots as though they have thoughts about me, or about their own personal goals, or about the world in which they exist. That tendency suggests an interesting aspect of human psychology, connected to our social minds . We are hard-wired to care what other people think about us, and we very easily extend that concern to robots. Here's a recent article about how the language-learning app Duolingo, which features an owl-shaped avatar (a kind of robot), uses "emotional blackmail" to keep application users engaged: https://uxdesign.cc/20-days-of-emotional-blackmail-from-duolingo-4f566523e3c5 This bird-shaped bit of code tells users things like "you're scaring me!" and "I miss you" if they haven...

Inside the Intuitive Mind: Social Support Can Facilitate or Inhibit Behavior Change

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