Scientific Network

In order to advance our understanding of social interaction, we will carry out four interdisciplinary scientific workshops that integrate findings from philosophy, psychological science and neuroscience. We wish to focus on social cognitive and affective phenomena as well as related social behaviors when it comes to interpersonal interactions.

In a first workshop, we attempt to define the concepts of 'Theory of Mind', empathy, and related social behaviors to more clearly separate them as constructs, and in turn link them in an overarching theoretical framework. This should set the stage for the following workshops.

In a second workshop, we wish to explore in an integrative manner the specificities and relationships of involved target agents across the phenomena of ´Theory of Mind´, empathy and related social behaviors.

In a third workshop, we wish to address methodological and test-theoretical challenges related to testing and measuring these social interaction phenomena - particularly we wish to address issues concerning validity and reliability as well as issues concerning the multitude of employed dependent measures.

Finally, in a fourth workshop we would like to address technical challenges when studying social phenomena in real-time interpersonal encounters.

As philosophy, psychological science and neuroscience have traditionally all worked intensively on issues of understanding social interactions, as well as their associated cognitive and affective phenomena, processes and mechanisms, we believe bringing particularly these disciplines together will be extremely fruitful when aiming to 'Understand Others'.

This Scientific Network is sponsered by the German Research Foundation: