ABSTRACT

Every day we make predictions based on limited information, in business and at home. Will this company’s stock performance continue? Will the job candidate I just interviewed be a good employee? What kind of adult will my child grow up to be? We tend to dismiss our predictive minds as prone to bias and mistakes, but in this talk, I’ll make the case that our intuition is surprisingly good at using small clues to make some big predictions. I’ll also discuss the ‘dark side’ of our predictive capacities that can’t be ignored.

About the Speaker:

Matthew Hertenstein received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and is on the faculty at DePauw University, a liberal-arts institution in Indiana. Hertenstein’s research focuses on emotional communication and he is the author of The Tell: The Little Clues that Reveal Big Truths about Who We Are, published by Basic Books and translated into languages ranging from Korean to Portuguese. Hertenstein has been featured in numerous media outlets including television (NBC’s Today Show, Fox & Friends), radio (NPR, CBC, BBC), magazines (Scientific American Mind, The Economist), and newspapers (The Guardian, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle).