"Irrationality: Is the Brain Half Empty or Half Full?"
On May 24, 2023, Harvard's Steven Pinker sat down with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler (Chicago Booth) for a wide-ranging conversation on rationality, AI, overcoming collective action problems, and more. This event was held at the Logan Center for the Arts as part of the Roman Family Center's Think Better speaker series.
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Meet the Speakers
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is an experimental cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature. Pinker’s research on vision, language, and social relations has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”
Richard Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics. Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human