Guest Lecturer: Cognition

Over the summer I had the opportunite to give two guest lectures for the Cognition module with Prof. Ulrike Hahn. The module is designed to be introductory, while at the same time directly involving students with formal approaches to cognitive science.

For the first lecture on Rational Choice, I guided students through the long history on the psychology of decision-making, from Expected Value Theory to Expected Utility Theory and Prospect Theory. Beyond being drawn into the idea that we can formalize subjective preferences, the students really enjoyed our thorough discussions on classic paradoxes like the St. Petersburg Paradox and the Allais Paradox. We also discussed how the normative axioms underlying e.g. Expected Utility Theory need to be informed by descriptive research.

For the second lecture on Causal Reasoning, I introduced the students to the idea of causal DAGs through the famous Monty Hall Problem (which none of the students were familiar with!). After walking through how the Causal Markov Condition can be used to provide an efficient factorization of any causal Bayes network, we applied our new tools to the Monty Hall Problem to show the counterintuitive result that it is better to switch doors. Next, we talked about how interventions allow us to disentangle correlations that are causal from those that are confounded or happenstance, this time using Simpson’s Paradox (the UC Berkely Gender Bias case study) as a classic demonstration. Finally, we pivoted from causal reasoning to causal judgment, discussing my research on the most disputed causal structures in the philosophy of causation: joint causation, overdetermination, pre-emption, omission, and double prevention. Although these examples were perhaps the silliest, the students agreed that the examples make clear why causal reasoning is important to everyday decision-making.