Attitudes to inequalities: perceptions, judgments, justifications

Angarika Deb is a PhD researcher at Central European University, working in the Departments of Cognitive Science and Social Anthropology, under an interdisciplinary fellowship. Her current research interests lie in the cognitive mechanisms that underlie social behavior and the role of social and cultural norms in the evolution of behavioral traits. She has worked in various fields, ranging from evolutionary biology and human behavioral ecology to cognitive linguistics, cultural evolution and anthropology.

Christophe Heintz is an associate professor and head of the Department of Cognitive Science at Central European University. He is especially interested in the cognitive bases and social determinants of fairness judgments. Reciprocally, he wonders to what extent such judgments, moral intuitions and social preferences actually shape institutions, norms, and other social phenomena. Other research interests include: epistemic vigilance, science studies, cultural evolution, communication.

Emeric Henry is Professor of Economics at Sciences Po Paris. He is a microeconomist using theory, empirics and experiments to study public policy issues. His current interests focus on the role of the public sector, the impact of media and fact checking and the dynamics of social norms. He has published in the best journals in economics (AER, JPE, JEEA, EJ) and outside (PNAS, Management Science). He is a CEPR fellow.

Annabelle Lever is a political philosopher working at the intersection of contemporary political philosophy, philosophy and public policy, and philosophy of law. Her research and publications are primarily concerned with privacy and democracy, although she has also published articles on sexual and racial equality, on intellectual property and the ethics of patenting human genes. She is currently editing New Frontiers in the Philosophy of Intellectual Property for Cambridge University Press. She is a Professor at Sciences Po in Paris and a Permanent Researcher at the Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (CEVIPOF).

Vlad Naumescu is an associate professor and head of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University. He is an anthropologist of religion broadly interested in questions of learning and cultural transmission. He has done extensive fieldwork on religious transformation in postsocialist Western Ukraine (2003-2006), with Russian Old Believers in Romania (2007-2012), and Syrian Christians in Kerala, South India (since 2013). He has explored various topics including politics of memory, technologies of the imagination, time and temporality, doubt in ritual, ethics and morality, religious-secular formations in state socialism and after. 

Lou Safra is an assistant professor at the CEVIPOF (Sciences Po Paris) and an associate researcher at the Institut d'Études Cognitives (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives & Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure, Paris). She is interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying social and political behaviour, notably leader choice and cooperation. In particular, she adopts an ecological and evolutionary approach to better understand the inter-individual differences in these domains, across both space and time. She relies on behavioral data, social surveys, computational modeling and, more recently, the analysis of cultural artifacts such as paintings and books.

Cătălin Augustin Stoica is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration. His research interests cover social research methodology, social stratification and inequality, economic sociology and anthropology, quantitative methods, conspiracy theories, social movements, sociology of communism and post-communism. His works have been published in Romanian, US, German, Polish, and Hungarian journals and books.

Akos Szegofi is a PhD researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Central European University. He works on the human cognitive capacities that assess the truth-value of communicated information – also known as epistemic vigilance. He is interested in contemporary communicative phenomena such as fake news, disinformation and conspiracy theories, as well as the institutional and cultural contexts of post-truth. His research uses an interdisciplinary approach merging experimental and historical methods alike. He has previously worked in the fields of journalism, international relations and nationalism studies.

Radu Umbreș currently works at the Faculty of Political Science, National School for Political Studies and Public Administration. He does research in social anthropology, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. His book, titled Living with Distrust. Morality and cooperation in a Romanian village, will be published later in 2021 by Oxford University Press.

Harry Walker is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at The London School of Economics and Political Sciences. He specialises in the anthropology of Latin America, with a focus on the indigenous peoples of Amazonia. He has carried out long-term fieldwork with the Urarina, a hunting and horticultural people of lowland Peru, exploring a broad range of issues including selfhood, shamanism, law, materiality, sport, bureaucracy, egalitarianism, happiness, and the commons. His most recent research concerns everyday experiences of justice and injustice.