Summary
Willard explains how vignettes can be used to present controlled social situations and infer beliefs, norms, and intuitions from participants’ reactions. She focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of short stories as experimental tools: they allow comparison across scenarios, but they also depend heavily on wording, cultural context, and what participants think the situation is really asking. The talk treats vignettes as a flexible method for research on religion, cooperation, hierarchy, corruption, and cultural variation.