National Collegiate Honors Council

 

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Date of this Version

2025

Document Type

Article

Citation

Honors in Practice (2025) 21: 243-246

Comments

Copyright 2025, NCHC and the author. Used by permission

Abstract

This essay presents an interdisciplinary seminar in honors that challenges students to move beyond the limitations of human experience and examine cognition and behavior across species, environments, and hypothetical extraterrestrial minds. A Choose Your Own Adventure structure encourages reflection on cognitive biases, thereby fostering a nuanced understanding of intelligence, perspective, and sociality. Author observes that students benefit from frameworks that disrupt human-centered biases and suggests that engaging students in speculative scenarios prompts confronting and questioning assumptions about intelligence, ethics, and social dynamics.

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