Thoughts on week 10

This week in class we had four presentations from other groups, the subjects of which were thought provoking...

• Inequality Aversion: this covered the area of unequal pay and Capuchin monkeys. The most interesting point for me was the possible explanation that a sense of justice may be inherited, not just a social construct. Certainly worth looking into further.
• Social Dilemmas: using fluctuating asymmetry as a measure of male attractiveness, it was shown that such attractiveness was associated with uncooperative tendencies. Although there appeared to be lots of methodological issues with regard to the study, the issue of unattractive individuals having to put more effort in to get things was interesting and rang some bells from the past re other stuff I've come across with regard to people's performances in job interviews and why women should always wear makeup for interviews...
• The one or the many: this presentation dealt with contributions to single/group, identified/unidentified victims. I have come across this subject before, when I completed a study last year for a 3rd year student's project.
• Foraging decisions in hummingbirds: I didn't manage to pick anything up from this presentation, apart from the wonderful presentations that can be produced on Mac computers! However, an interesting point was made in the discussion that followed: it has long been assumed that animals use rational decision making models and much research has been based on this assumption; however, it seems that this may not be the case and that models more akin to heuristics are being used, similar to humans.

Preparation for our presentation on Overconfidence next week continues. Have now learnt how to use Google presentations and finally (!) worked out how to add a picture to it, which is no mean feat when copy & paste doesn't work so well on Google docs, as documented when you search for help! I've also finished reading the other papers on this subject, around which we'll be basing our wiki page and it was interesting to see that Kruger & Dunning's initial findings seem to be very robust, as tested by Ehrlinger et al (2008). The latter also raise some very interesting issues with regard to the application of their findings, but more of this on the wiki page...