Speaker: Petroc Sumner, Ph.D, Head of School of Psychology, College of Biomedical and Life Sciences, Cardiff University

Time: 16:00 – 17:50, 2019-03-04

Venue: Room 1113, Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract: Psychopaths, climate change and eye-movements are interesting topics of study for psychologists because they each tell us about how humans make decisions, and they challenge ideas of free-will and personal responsibility, but in different ways. Psychopaths may have different emotional processing compared to other people, and this changes the decisions they take. Does that make them any less responsible? Climate change is a global issue, and often considered something governments have to change. But is it the result of millions of individual decisions about diet, travel, heating and so on, every day. Is it possible to change enough of those decisions to make a difference? Eye-movements are used to learn how the brain makes very simple basic decisions. In these basic models, free-will is reduced to random noise. What does that mean? I will try to give a simple introduction to these three fascinating topics to illustrate how broad a discipline psychology is.

Host: Xiaolin Zhou