Collective Intelligence

Directors : Hugo Mercier & Brent Strickland

Presentation

Our team studies the cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to become smarter when they reason, solve problems, or make decisions together. 

Members

FACULTY

Hugo Mercier

My work has focused on two main topics :

The function and workings of reasoning (see The Enigma of Reason).
How we evaluate communicated information (see Not Born Yesterday).

Brent Strickland

"Core knowledge" refers to a set of cognitive systems that appear very early in human development, universally across cultures, and are often preserved to some degree by natural selection. Some examples are an understanding of basic object mechanics, numbers, other people’s mental states, and social categories (e.g. "my group" vs. "outsider"). 

My research asks how core knowledge continues to operate into adulthood in automatic and unconscious ways. I have made a range of recent discoveries showing, in particular, that core knowledge structures automatically guide adult processes of language, memory, visual attention. They even impact important higher level judgments such as those employed in moral and political reasoning.

Publications

https://brentstrickland.net/publications.html
https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/publications