For a generation, the United States, along with most of the West, was in the thrall of an ideology that asserted that the magic of market competition held the solution to every problem. But even the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, knew that this ideology is false-a lesson we are learning anew in the current financial crisis.

Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action Barry Schwartz argues two things. First, markets have their place, but that place isn't every place. And second, even in their place, to work properly, markets depend on nonmarket values that market competition actively corrodes.

The idea that we will play, work and live our social lives within computer-driven "virtual worlds" has been a staple in cyberpunk science-fiction for some time. Recent news stories may suggest that this is close to becoming reality. Corporations and institutions have been setting up virtual offices or branches in the virtual world known as Second Life.  Low-wage sweatshops where employees collect resources within the game World of Warcraft which are then sold for U.S. dollars to American and European players have been spreading in southeastern China. In the game EVE Online, thousands of players are engaged in an ongoing war which has sometimes spilled out into other online media that are not directly associated with the game.

Professor of History Tim Burke explores the evolution and implications of massively-multiplayer online computer games. The media hype about virtual worlds has often been excessive, but they are both an interesting media form that has exciting creative possibilities and a novel opportunity to study and think about the way that human societies form, organize, and become richly complex.

For more on the pervasiveness and changing nature of gaming culture, check out Second Skin, a documentary written and produced by Victor Piñeiro '00. The film is touted as one of the best docs of 2008.

by Associate Professor of Psychology Frank Durgin

"What is perception for? Here I argue that perceptual systems work very hard to improve the precision of perceptual discrimination — to the point that the metric accuracy of perception is often sacrificed in favor of precision," Durgin says. "This principle is illustrated by many illusions that reveal the way perceptual systems alter their coding spaces when they adapt to contingencies — such as those that exist in the multisensory array of visual, vestibular, kinesthetic and auditory information produced during walking. Because walking is so common, our perceptions are actually distorted during walking so as to make us more sensitive to the perceptual information that we can expect to receive as feedback. As a result, we are highly tuned to walk accurately but our conscious experiences of the individual sensory variables (e.g., optic flow speed) are often biased and inaccurate during walking."

by Associate Professor of Psychology Andrew Ward

"From binge eating to excessive anger, many sources of adverse physical and mental health share a common theme: the inability of individuals to control their own behavior," Ward says. "The goal of the research described in this talk is to explain why individuals often fail at self-regulation and how they can succeed. According to the presented analysis, regulating the self typically demands a significant expenditure of mental resources. When those resources are limited in some fashion, the result is a state of affairs we term "attentional myopia," in which individuals can focus on only the most immediate bodily and environmental cues, to the neglect of more distal stimuli. The work suggests important implications for domains of self-control that include dieting, smoking cessation, and the regulation of anger-driven aggression."

Americans value freedom of choice perhaps above all else, but as choices increase, they can be transformed from instruments of freedom into instruments of tyranny, threatening happiness, well-being, self-esteem, and optimism. In this talk, Barry Schwartz will explain who suffers from too many choices and why.