Time:　13:30pm-16:30pm
Date:　 Oct 31, 2012 (Wed)
Venue:  Lecture Hall, North Building

Talk1: Psychological and Neural Components of Legal Third-Party Punishment 
Speaker:　Frank Krueger, Ph.D.
　　　　　 Assistant Professor, George Mason University
Abstract:
Although legal third-party punishment (TPP) is an essential feature of large-scale human societies, remarkably little is known about the psychological components of TPP and the effective connectivity of its underlying neural network (direction and strength of connections). By employing parametric fMRI and a TPP rating task in a group of healthy participants asking them to estimate how much punishment an offender deserved for crimes, we revealed a neural TPP network relying upon specific psychological components each modulated by a distinct cortical midline structure drawing on elementary and domain-general computations: norm violation of the offense (dmPFC), harm to the victim (PCC), and benefit for the offender (vmPFC). Applying multivariate Granger causality mapping, we identified a reciprocally connected vmPFC-dmPFC circuit as the driver of the TPP network, which served as a convergence zone linking information across TPP regions to determine the appropriate degree of punishment for illegal behavior. The identified components of TPP confirm the criminal law’s central underpinnings of punishment: it depends first on the detection of a norm violation and then on an assessment of the costs and benefits of the violation (i.e. the harm to the victim and the benefits to the offender). Our novel findings help to address future questions about law and policy that have been difficult to resolve based on traditional models of academic and folk psychology.

Talk2: Individual differences in negotiation performance 
Speaker:　Prof. Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Ph.D.
　　　　　 Olin School of Business
　　　　　 Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract:
For decades, many well-known commentaries have concluded that individual differences play a minimal role in predicting negotiation performance.  Research findings tend to find coefficients that are modest in size and rarely replicate across studies.  My team and I have been attempting to take a fresh perspective on this longstanding question.  First, we review past research for a large collection of traits to examine, and when including them in a single study we find patterns that emerging.  Notably, performance is greater for individuals with traits that signify positive associations towards the self and positive beliefs about the negotiation setting.  In conducting this work, we address numerous methodological limitations in past research.  Notably, we use David Kenny’s Social Relations Model and have each individual take part in multiple negotiations.  Second, we coded in detail the behaviors of great negotiators and map these behaviors onto personality traits that have been ignored in past work.  Third, we are conducting a meta-analysis of past work and, in doing so, find more consistency in findings than previous commentaries have perceived.

Attachment:
　  1 Psychological and Neural Components of Legal Third-Party Punishment (.doc)
　  2 Individual differences in negotiation performance (.doc)