The Department of Psychology and the Department’s Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging presents:

Cailin O'Connor, Ph.D., 

Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science,  University of California, Irvine speaking at the

4th Memorial James Sidanius Lecture on Social Inequality 

1:30 PM... (Note new time)

Topic:  The Dynamics of Inequity 

It is no secret that some people get more and others get less. In most societies, seemingly irrelevant personal factors like gender and race importantly determine patterns of resource distribution. In this talk, I will use cultural evolutionary models to explain the ubiquity of such patterns, and illuminate features of how categorical inequity works. As I argue, in a bargaining population, the simple addition of a social category like gender or race completely changes the expected cultural evolutionary outcomes by breaking symmetry between actors in a group. I explore the conditions under which members of one category are expected to end up disadvantaged in these models, focusing on power imbalances, intersectional effects, and information carried by visible tags.