Title: Exploring Just Enough? An Origin Story of Stereotypes
Xuechunzi Bai, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Abstract: Traditional explanations for stereotypes suggest they arise from human deficits (ingroup-favoring motives, cognitive biases) or environmental factors (majority advantages, real group differences). I propose an alternative explanation: stereotypes can emerge when exploration is costly. Even optimal decision-makers in ideal environments can inadvertently form incorrect impressions from arbitrary encounters. This talk builds on my prior research (Bai et al., 2022 & 2024) to explore how individual incorrect beliefs can evolve into collective misperceptions, simply through information compression, establishing a new microfoundation for statistical discrimination. Preliminary evidence comes from a computational cognitive model (multi-agent multi-armed bandit), an LLM multi-agent simulation (GPT-4o), and a multiplayer online hiring experiment (N=200 pilot data).
Time: 03/12/25 3:30 PM
Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium
If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).