Résumé de section

    • Description

      The same underlying idea — "this matters to me" — gets formalized differently across discipline
      Building an explicit taxonomy makes those differences visible instead of assumed, and gives students a shar
      vocabulary to carry through the rest of the semester



      Learning Objectives:

      1. Construct a taxonomy distinguishing value, wealth, utility, expected value, reward, and expected reward across
      everyday, economic, psychological, and neuroscientific usage

      2. Narrate the historical economic progression from value to probability to utility (Bernoulli → von Neumann–
      Morgenstern), identifying what problem each step solved.

      3. Identify structural parallels between economic utility and neuroscientific reward as candidate formalizations 
      "value," without yet claiming they're equivalent.

      4. Recognize that probability/uncertainty is being introduced only instrumentally here — enough to follow the utility
      story — and will be treated as a topic in its own right later (weeks 7–8)

      5. Narrate the psychological progression (more details in self study)

    • In-Class Activity (90 mins)

    • Week 2 - Slides Fichier
      Déposé le 22 sept. 26, 15:00
    • Values - Padlet URL

      Link: https://padlet.com/unige/what-do-you-value-s023t8a2fgf5jyn13zmg?pw=KfVfUKOCSYgiCr2zbXoXTA

      Password: DMUU1

    • Self-Study (2-4 hours per week)

    • Self Study Week 02 Fichier
      Self-Check Questions
      Companion to "Psychology's History of Value, Reward, and Motivation"

      These are for your own use — not an assignment, not submitted, not graded. They're designed to test the connections between the two history documents (economics and psychology), not to test whether you can recall any single card. If you can answer these, you've read both documents the way they're meant to be read.

      1. Economics removed mental states from its core theory through Hicks & Allen and Samuelson, in 1934–1938. Psychology's parallel move — Thorndike and Skinner's behaviorism — spans almost the same years, 1898–1938. What is genuinely the same about these two removals, and what is different about why each field made the move?

      2. Atkinson's expectancy-value formula (1957) and von Neumann and Morgenstern's expected utility (1944) share the same mathematical structure — a probability-like term multiplied by a value term — arrived at independently, thirteen years apart. Name one plausible reason this same structure would show up twice, in two fields that weren't reading each other's work.

      3. Look across the seven psychology entries as a group. Does "mental states in or out" move in one direction over time, or does it go back and forth? What does your answer imply about whether Samuelson's removal of mental states from economics (this week's §4) was a permanent, settled move, or one instance of a pattern that keeps recurring?

      4. Hull and Maslow were both publishing in 1943, working on essentially the same broad topic — what drives behavior — and reached very different positions on how to treat internal, unobservable states scientifically. In two or three sentences, contrast their positions.

      5. No single published paper covers both of these histories together — you needed two separate documents to see the parallel at all. What does that suggest about how academic fields organize themselves, even when they are, in a real sense, studying the same underlying question from two directions?

      PS: the references at the bottom of the document are not to be read. Only reading required is the document and use the attached questions to guide and help your studying

      Déposé le 23 sept. 26, 16:34

    • Optional: Feed Your Curiosity