Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Kristoffer Moody ( University of Edinburgh ) on his recent paper, " The Manipulationist Threat to moral responsibility " ( Synthese 2024). Kristoffer Moody We all have that one relative, let’s call him Antonio, who, at family gatherings, irritates us by expounding on how vaccines cause autism, that the election was stolen, or other strange, problematic, or offensive beliefs. While it’s tendentious whether or not we can hold Antonio responsible for holding those beliefs, it may seem clear that we can hold him responsible for acting on the basis of those beliefs. However, I claim using evidence from psychology that Antonio may have been manipulated in the formation of his belief. I claim, on the basis of evidence of our propensity towards choice-blindness, the ‘truth effect’, and confirmation bias, that we are far more susceptible to manipulation than we might pre-theoretically think, and that we appear to be particularly so susceptible via social medi...

Today we continue our mini series exploring issues regarding technological enhancement in learning and education, featuring papers from the  “ Cheating Education ”  special issue of Educational Theory. T his week, Sophie Stammers discusses her  paper “Improving knowledge acquisition and dissemination through technological interventions on cognitive biases”. When we think about the role that technology could play in enhancing cognition, much of the literature focuses on extending faculties that are already performing well, so that they perform even better. We also know that humans possess a range of cognitive biases which produce systematically distorted cognitions. Could we use technology to erase our cognitive biases? Should we? In this paper I wanted to think about the specific threats that cognitive biases pose to learning and education, and focused on two commonly recognised types of cognitive bias in particular: 

Mikkel Gerken is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. In this post he writes about his new book ‘On Folk Epistemology. How we think and talk about knowledge’ . A central claim of my book,  On Folk Epistemology. How we think and talk about knowledge,  is that some folk epistemological patterns of knowledge ascriptions are best explained by cognitive biases. I argue that this approach to folk epistemology yields diagnoses of some hard puzzles of contemporary epistemology. So, On Folk Epistemology seeks to contribute to some prominent debates in contemporary epistemology. For example, I criticize contextualism, pragmatic encroachment, knowledge-first epistemology etc. If you want to check it out, there is an introduction and overview here . In this blog post, however, I will emphasize why the study of folk epistemology is an important task. In a nutshell, it is because folk epistemology is extremely consequential. Consider, for example, the role...

In this post Andrea Polonioli interviews  Thomas Sturm (pictured below), ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) and member of the UAB's Center for History of Science (CEHIC). His research centers on the relation between philosophy and psychology, including their history. Here, we discuss his views on empirical research on human rationality. AP: The psychology of judgment and decision-making has been divided into what appear to be radically different perspectives on human rationality. Whilst research programs like heuristics and biases have been associated with a rather bleak picture of human rationality, Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues have argued that very simple heuristics can make us smart. Yet, some philosophers have also argued that, upon close scrutiny, these research programs do not share any real disagreement. What is your take on the so-called “rationality wars” in psychology? TS: Let me begin...

On 5th and 6th September the University of Sheffield hosted the conference Bias in Context : Psychological and Structural Explanations, organized by Erin Beeghly and Jules Holroyd  (pictured above). Here I summarise the seven papers given at the conference. Joseph Sweetman  (pictured below) opened day one with his paper ‘Evidence-based Social Equality: Current Problems and Future prospects’. The talk was structured around answering five questions related to identifying the phenomenon of social inequality, whether we should do anything about social inequality, and what we should do, what the evidence for social inequality is, and the efficacy of unconscious bias training in Higher Education. After giving answers to the first four questions, Joseph reported on his evaluation of an unconscious bias training programme in order to speak to the fifth. He found that though post-training awareness of unconscious bias was higher in the participants, there were no significant diff...

This post is by Miguel A. Vadillo  (pictured above), Lecturer in Decision Theory at King's College London. In this post he writes about cognitive biases, error management theory, and the reproducibility of research findings.  The human mind is the end product of hundreds of thousands of years of relentless natural selection. You would expect that such an exquisite piece of software should be capable of representing reality in an accurate and objective manner. Yet decades of research in cognitive science show that we fall prey to all sorts of cognitive biases and that we systematically distort the information we receive. Is this the best evolution can achieve? A moment’s thought reveals that the final goal of evolution is not to develop organisms with exceptionally accurate representations of the environment, but to design organisms good at surviving and reproducing. And survival is not necessarily about being rational, accurate, or precise. The target goal is actually t...

We humans have a well-established tendency to be overly optimistic about our future and to think that the risk of bad things happening to us is lower than is likely, while we think that the chance of good things happening to us is higher than is likely. Why is this case? What drives these positive illusions? There are two possible ways in which we can understand and try to answer these questions. We can either look at the causal mechanisms underlying unrealistic optimism, or we can ask why this feature has survived and spread through human populations. Evolutionary psychology aims to answer the second question, in essence claiming that we are unrealistically optimistic because this has had benefits in terms of survival and reproduction. So why should it be adaptive to have systematically skewed beliefs, which are frequently unwarranted and/or false?  Martie Haselton and Daniel Nettle have argued that unrealistic optimism is a form of error management, it helps us make...

Michel De Lara (below left) is a researcher concerned with the mathematical and economic aspects of risk. Jérôme Boutang (below right) is a communication professional with expertise in environmental threats such as air pollution and climate change. Together with the Paris School of Economics, they started a research project on risk perception which soon developed into the Biased Mind project. In this post they introduce their new book The Biased Mind , which is published in the Copernicus popular science collection of Springer. Why is it that the French eat snails but not slugs? What makes the number 7 so special? Will your recent marriage last? Why is it that Batman, Superman and Spiderman fearlessly defeat evil monsters, but are hopelessly shy when it comes to women? And why is it that we crave sugary and greasy food, even though we know it's not healthy? The answer to these questions is that our mind is like a smartphone, filled with adaptive software, whose different...

On 11-12 December 2015, The 2nd International Conference on Natural Cognition: Rationality and Its Rivals was held at University of Macau, organised by Nevia Dolcini . Interesting and exciting talks were given, mostly by philosophers, on varieties of topics including; rational norms, reasoning, ecological rationality, cognitive biases, self-deception, religious beliefs, and emotions and moods. I briefly summarise some talks below. (See here for the full programme with abstracts.) In some cases, there is no non-circular justification of a particular rational norm or rule. For instance, Hume's famous discussion of inductive inferences seems to show that there is no non-circular justification of inductive inferences. One might try to justify inductive inferences on the basis of their past success but, as Hume pointed out, this justification itself is inductive and hence circular. In his talk "Circularity and Objective Rational Norms", Jonathan Ichikawa (British ...

This post is by Sophie Stammers , PhD student in Philosophy at King’s College London. Here she writes about two policy papers, Unintentional Bias in Court and Unintentional Bias in Forensic Investigation , written as part of a recent research fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) provides accessible overviews of research from the sciences, prepared for general parliamentary use, many of which are also freely available . My papers are part of a recent research stream exploring how advances in science and technology interact with issues in crime and justice: it would seem that if there is one place where unbiased reasoning and fair judgement really matter, then it is in the justice system. My research focuses on implicit cognition, and in particular, implicit social bias. I am interested in the extent to which implicit biases differ from...

In this post I interview Helena Matute  (picture below), who is Professor of Psychology and director of the Experimental Psychology laboratory at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. AJ: You are a leading expert on causal illusions. Could you explain what causal illusions and illusions of control are? HM: A causal illusion (or illusion of causality) occurs when people perceive a causal relationship between two events that are actually unrelated. The illusion of control is just a special type of causal illusion in which the potential cause is our own behavior. That is, a causal illusion is often called an illusion of control when people believe that their own behavior is the cause of the unrelated effect, or, in other words, when they believe that they have control over uncontrollable events in their environment. Illusions of causality and of control occur in most people, particularly under certain conditions. For example, when the potential cause and the potential e...

This post is by Predrag Teovanović (pictured above), graduate student at the University of Belgrade. In this post he summarises his recent paper ‘ Individual Differences in Cognitive Biases: Evidence Against One-Factor Theory of Rationality ’, co-authored with Goran Knežević and Lazar Stankov, published in Intelligence. If there is a minimal definition of rational behavior, it can be found here . From the normative standpoint, rational behaviour is hard (if not impossible) to maintain all the time. Hence, we satisfice by trying to optimize the boundaries of bounded rationality at the intersection of our own resources (time, information, money, and cognitive capacities) and environmental demands. Cognitive biases (CBs) emerge in that junction.   Since what defines rational behaviour depends on both environment and organism, and since specific CBs arise in different environments - it is reasonable not to expect from CBs to be highly related to individual differences ...

On 15 th -16 th October 2015 the University of Leeds Minorities and Philosophy chapter hosted the MAP@Leeds Implicit Bias Conference . The conference included a large number of high quality talks covering a wide-range of issues relating to implicit bias. This report focuses on three of these talks.   In her talk, “ What do we want from a model of implicit bias?”, Jules Holroyd  (pictured above) noted that competing models of implicit cognition have emerged from different sources, with different priorities and conceptual frameworks. She set out a framework for assessing these competing models. She set out some desiderata for a model of implicit cognition, set out some test cases, and considered some recent models of implicit bias in light of the desiderata and cases. She showed that models provided by Levy, Schwitzgebel, Mandelbaum, Gendler and Machery each fail to meet the desiderata. In developing this argument she provided a clear articulation of what an accoun...

I'm Adam Harris and I'm an experimental psychologist from University College London. I am perhaps an unusual contributor to the Imperfect Cognitions blog as I have argued that cognitions might seem imperfect because of imperfections in prevalent methodologies, predominantly arising from a failure to appreciate the importance of understanding the appropriate normative basis of a task. Specifically, my work has suggested that the assumed ubiquity of optimism across our species is based on questionable evidence. A prominent example of this work is presented in a paper I wrote with Ulrike Hahn (published in the Psychological Review) in which we demonstrated, through simulation, that rational agents could be labelled as optimistic on the prevalent, comparative method of testing unrealistic optimism. On this method, participants respond to the question "Compared with the average student of your age and sex, how likely are you to..." where future life events ar...