Dr Rupy Sawhney (University of Tennessee):

Becoming a Global Compassionate Servant Leader - Alignment Between Productivity and Retention Levels

Thursday 10th November 2022, University of Warwick

An operational excellence model in which the reduction of work-related stress and the enhancement of employee well-being are incorporated into the design of productive systems and organizations was developed by the Center for Advanced Systems Research and Education (CASRE) at the University of Tennessee. We believe it is necessary to change the mindset that either productivity wins or employee well-being wins. One of the essential steps in this process is to change the focus from the word "efficiency"—which is code for making people work faster or harder—to "reliability"—the design of systems that provide employees with all the resources to allow them to complete the assigned work. Our model—presented in four modules—transforms organizational productivity while simultaneously reducing employee effort and stress. The model is presented as the basis of global compassionate servant leadership since, besides all the technical components, it also includes factors that will increase the self-awareness of each individual and find a way to align the company's interests with individual personal aspirations.

Recording of the webinar linked here.

Children and Inequality Conference

Friday 22 April 2022 (Faculty of Arts, University of Warwick)

The Behaviour, Brain & Society GRP supported a Children and Inequality Conference which was hosted by the School of Psychology, and sponsored by the British Psychological Society.

The UK network on “Children and Inequality” brings together researchers from across the social sciences to discuss and investigate these questions. At this conference we will mainly focus on recent developmental psychological research on how children from different social groups experience and respond to inequality. Understanding the developmental origins of children's perceptions of inequality may help researchers, educators, and policy makers combat the effects of inequality on children and societies.

Agenda of the event linked here.

Great Minds: An Exploration of the Brain

Monday 14 March 2022 (Radcliffe, University of Warwick).

In collaboration with the Health GRP, the Behaviour, Brain & Society GRP delivered a seminar around the brain, how we think and how our thoughts impact our lives. On the day we asked:

• What do we know and what are we discovering about the form and function of the human brain?
• How does our Brain Work?
• How do we make big decisions, and how do these decisions impact our lives?
• Why do we make certain financial decisions, and what are the implications of these?
• How can we optimise our mental health?
• How does healthy eating tie in with the brain, and developing healthy mental habits?

Agenda of the event linked here.

Behavioural Humanities Speaker Series 2021

Facilitated by our academic lead Professor Thomas Hills, this speaker series focused on contributions from literature, the visual arts, and music and investigates how the behavioural science and the humanities inform one another.

Behavioral Humanities Speaker series

Unfolding vision: Cezanne’s ‘personal way of seeing’, Professor Paul Smith

Tuesday 16th March 2021 @ 3pm GMT

This paper concerns perceptual explanations for a range of so-called ‘distortions’ in Cezanne’s paintings. Drawing on Gestalt and recent psychology, it examines how the painter’s habit of fixating for up to twenty minutes on objects caused things in peripheral vision to fade away and their vertical edges to slope to the left, and horizontal edges to look ‘broken’. It will also investigate why Cezanne’s faces appear devoid of character because of the same sustained way of looking, or how this supplanted normal, holistic, and fast face perception based on low-spatial frequency information. The paper will end by considering how Cezanne viewed the landscape slowly, for several hours at a time, and how doing so made it possible to synthesis those of its features which are most revealing about shape, and thereby express its ‘heaviness’.

"Warts and All”: Film, Ethics and Human Frailty, Dr Michele Aaron

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 @ 3pm GMT

In the 2017 AHRC funded research project, 'Digital Technology and Human Vulnerability: Towards an Ethical Praxis', participants from John Taylor Hospice in North Birmingham were given critical and practical training to create six films. These have been displayed and discussed with all kinds of audiences, locally, nationally and internationally, ever since. In this presentation, I want to use the films themselves to reconsider the ethical issues at the heart of this project and its central concern with the potential of film to transform our understanding of, and response to, human vulnerability. Michele Aaron is Reader in Film and Television and a Fellow of Warwick's Institute of Engagement. Her last two books focused on death and dying: an edited collection and the monograph, Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I (2014). She has increasingly redirected her fascination with difficult images into collaborative projects with community groups, charities and artists, and Screening Rights Film Festival, which she set up in 2015, to explore further the potential for film to affect personal, social and political change.

Workshop on Exposure to Political Violence and Economic Behaviour

Monday 5th April 2021 13:50-16:30

Tuesday 6th April 2021 13:50-16:30

This workshop was be the first of a series of similar dissemination events on the micro-level consequences of political violence exposure.

Organised by Dr Arzu Kibris, Associate Professor, Politics and International Studies (PAIS), the first event of this series will focus on economic behaviour. Please join us for a very interesting program of presentations by esteemed scholars of political violence.

'The Cultural Evolution of Explanations: from the Royal Society of London to Online Conspiracy Forums'

Friday 27th November 2020 at 16:00 GMT, 11:00 EST

In the first seminar of the Behavioural Data Science Series, from the Alan Turing Insitute Simon DeDeo (Carnegie Mellon University and the Santa Fe Institute) will lead a discussion on the cultural evolution of explanations. This work provides new insights into the basic psycho-social phenomenon of explanation-making, and shows how fundamental advances in the cognitive sciences can be applied to large-scale social phenomena of interest to the social and political sciences. The talk is based on joint work with Zachary Wojtowicz, Chloe Perry, Gabe Salmon, Will Thompson, and Zachary Nova