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.

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.