Thursday, 9th June 2022 - 4pm - Nick Chater Seminar

Title:    SPONTANEOUS RATIONALITY  

                    (joint work with Mike OaksfSPOrd, Psychology, Birkbeck)

ABSTRACT: 

t distributed, local, and largely public, processes of debate, reflection, action and observation can lead to (but do not justify) increasingly rational thoughts, theories, markets and behaviours. Spontaneous rationality emerges from the incoherence and paradox of everyday thought---consistency is rarely achieved, and only as the end-point of reasoning, not a precondition for reasoning. Spontaneous rationality typically arises from adversarial interactions: each agent seeks to exploit local incoherence in others, and to find, and resolve, local incoherence in themselves. This viewpoint on rationality resolves a variety of puzzles within the cognitive sciences; and has far-reaching implications for folk psychological explanation, epistemology, and formal models of reasoning in the cognitive sciences.

BIOGRAPHY: 

Prof. Nick Chater is currently Professor of Behavioural Science at the Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.  Prior to that, he held chairs in Psychology at Warwick and at UCL.  He did his undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Cambridge, and his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh; he was 2 years below Jon Oberlander, and so their time in Edinburgh overlapped.

Prof. Chater has over 200 publications in reasoning and decision making, and how these mechanisms relate to human language processing. He uses experimental, computational and mathematical methods in his study of basic mental processes.  He uses his work to inform public policy, and in particular is a member of the UK's Committee on Climate Change, and he's on the advisory board of the Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insight Team (BIT), popularly know as the 'Nudge Unit'..  Prof. Chater has won four national awards for psychological research, and has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognitive Science, Psychological Review, and Psychological Science.

He was elected a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2010 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012.

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