Talk by Bahador Bahrami (Munich): "A minimally-dishonest dominant strategy for winning the majority vote"

Affective Neuroscience and Psychophysiology  

Colloquium


Bahador Bahrami

(Munich)

 

19.11.2019 18:00 - 20:00 — GEMI, Room 1.134, Gosslerstr. 14, Goettingen

A minimally-dishonest dominant strategy for winning the majority vote

 

Political rhetoric, Aristotle told us, is what orators use to persuade their audience about future. Numerous studies in social psychology/neuroscience have asked what happens in the mind and brain of the audience. There is hardly any research about the mind and brain of the orator who employs rhetorical devices to persuade. I will address this question in my talk and discuss the psychological and neuronal basis of strategic use of confidence in persuading others. I will argue that it might be possible to use this approach to construct a dominant strategy for winning elections. Counterintuitively, the results suggest that it might be easier to persuade a crowd of voters than a singular individual.