OUR EVENTS

The Center for Technology and Social Behavior hosts a monthly speaker series that brings internationally renowned speakers to Northwestern University to meet with our researchers and present on a topic relevant to technology and social behavior. This year's lineup includes a brilliant collection of guests from around the world. You can also visit our CTSB Speaker Series Google Calendar for a complete listing of times and locations.

CTSB Lecture Series

Oct 27, 2009, 12pm
Barbara Rogoff, UC Santa Cruz
Cultural Aspects of Learning: Observation, Collaboration, and Multimodal Conversation
Frances Searle 1-483

Oct 29, 2009, 4pm
Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University
It's Not You, it's Me: Automatically Extracting Social Meaning from Speed Dates
Frances Searle 1-421

Nov 12, 2009, 4pm
Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan
The Social Self and the Social Brain: A Perspective of Cultural Neuroscience
Frances Searle 1-421

Dec 10, 2009, 4pm
Cynthia Breazeal, MIT Media Lab
Robots as Social Learners
Ford 1.350 (ITW)

Jan 21, 2010, 4pm
Pamela Hinds, Stanford University
Situated Knowing Who: Why Site Visits Matter in Global Work

Feb 18, 2010, 4pm
Fernanda Viégas, IBM Research
Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts

Mar 11, 2010, 4pm
Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo! Research
TBD

Apr 29, 2010, 4pm
Matthew Kam, Carnegie Mellon University
MILLEE: Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies

May 13, 2010, 4pm
Jenna Burrell, UC Berkeley
Evaluating Shared Access: Social Equality and the Circulation of Mobile Phones in Rural Uganda

Shinobu Kitayama
University of Michigan

The Social Self and the Social Brain: A Perspective of Cultural Neuroscience

Abstract:
Social and behavioral sciences have long conceived the human mind as an autonomous computational machine. However, recent developments in several fields of research including social and cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience among others have converged to suggest that the human mind – with all neural mechanisms underlying it -- is biologically prepared and, yet, it is shaped by and completed through each person’s active participation in socio-cultural environments and activities defined therein. In this presentation, evidence for this thesis is reviewed to suggest that the human agency (the self) and the neuronal component processes constituting the self (the brain) are socio-culturally conditioned and, as such, they can show remarkably divergent characteristics depending on the socio-cultural environments in which they are engaged. This new, more expanded view of personhood offers important implications for the behavioral sciences.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Psychology