Imperfect Cognitions

The blog post today is by Sophie Keeling on her recent paper " Responding to Second-Order Reasons " ( Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 2024). She is a 'Ramon y Cajal' fellow in philosophy at UNED, Madrid and a member of the Metis research group.   Sophie Keeling Philosophers love talking about reasons. Often this takes place at the first-order level: reasons for attending a party include the fact that it would be fun or that it would make your friends happy if you went. Reasons for believing that it will rain tomorrow include the weather forecast or the fact that it’s rainy season where you are. But arguably, some reasons are second-order . These are reasons to respond to a particular reason or not to respond to it.  For example, I might promise my therapist not to do things simply because it will please others and to only think about myself. And in the epistemic case, however good your reasoning in fact was, the fact that you carried it out under a shortne...

In this post,  Catherine Bortolon ,  Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology  at University Grenoble Alpes, France, and  Stéphane Raffard , Professor of Clinical Psychology at University Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, discuss their paper “ The contribution of optimism and hallucinations to grandiose delusions in individuals with schizophrenia ” recently published in Schizophrenia Research. We are interested in the psychological mechanisms that might contribute to psychotic experiences (e.g., delusional ideas) in individuals with and without a mental disorder. Recently, we become more interested in grandiose ideas (or delusions), which are defined as false beliefs about inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, and which are firmly held despite evidence of the contrary ( APA, 2013 ). It might include the belief of having a special power such as mind reading, a special identity such as being a king or related to Kurt Cobain, and in terms of knowledg...

In this post, I offer my take on what the project has achieved in the last year and tell you about my plans for the next twelve months. On the next four Tuesdays the rest of the team will do the same. The team PERFECT has been incredibly active and at the top of its capacity in the past year, with three post-docs and two PhD students all working full time. Andrea Polonioli  (picture below), who is leaving the project, continued Ema Sullivan-Bissett's work on belief, and focused on biased cognition and confabulation, examining also some interesting methodological issues that apply to philosophical investigation. He also worked really hard on improving the blog and our social media presence. Magdalena Antrobus  (picture below), who is also leaving the project, completed her PhD dissertation on the psychological and epistemic benefits of depression. As well as preparing several articles for publication on her own research, she co-authored with me a paper on depressiv...

This post is by Michiel van Elk who works in the Religion, Cognition and Behavior Lab at the University of Amsterdam and is currently a Fullbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He recently published a paper on the self-attribution bias and paranormal beliefs in Consciousness and Cognition.   My name is Michiel van Elk and I am intrigued by religious and spiritual experiences. Why do some people have paranormal encounters? What causes people to experience the feeling that another invisible being is present? How do mystical experiences and feelings of transcendence come about? As a researcher working at the Religion, Cognition and Behavior Lab at the University of Amsterdam, I aim to answer these questions. I often go into the field to study religious experiences, but also conduct lab-based studies using a variety of different psychological and neurocognitive techniques. Together with my colleagues we found for instance that mystical experiences can be induced th...

This post is by Adam Harris  (University College London) who recently published a paper entitled: " Understanding the coherence of the severity effect and optimism phenomena: Lessons from attention ". The paper appeared in a special issue on the nature and consequences of optimism, guest-edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. In this post, Adam (pictured below) offers a precis of his paper. Popular belief maintains that humans are prone to an almost universal optimistic bias, including a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. Related research findings include (all references are in the paper [AH1] ): Wishful thinking . For example, estimates of the likelihood of a sports team winning being higher from that team’s supporters than neutral individuals; Unrealistic comparative optimism . People think they are less likely to experience negative events, such as cancer, than...

Neil Garrett This post is by  Neil Garrett  who recently wrote a paper with  Tali Sharot , entitled  Optimistic Update Bias Holds Firm: Three Tests of Robustness Following Shah et al. . The paper is to appear in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism, guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. Much of the recent research on optimism has centred around the phenomenon of optimistic belief updating. A well established finding is that healthy individuals are reluctant to revise beliefs when in receipt of “bad news” compared to “good news”. One of the tasks that has been devised to show this in the lab, examines how beliefs about life events (such as being burgled or involved in a car accident) change when individuals find out the events are more or less likely to occur than they initially thought. For example, how much does someone alter their beliefs when provided with evidence that they are more li...

This post is by Leslie van der Leer  (Regent's University London) who recently wrote a paper entitled, "The Optimist Within", together with Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway). The paper is to appear in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism, guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. “Let me think it over”, you say as the travel agent advises you to buy insurance. But is this wise? Can we get a more accurate representation of our risks by ‘thinking them over’? Studies by Vul and Pashler (2008) and Herzog and Hertwig (2009) suggest the answer is “Yes”, provided that we combine our considered risk estimate with our initial estimate. These authors found that the well-known “wisdom-of-the-crowd” effect also applies within a single mind. The wisdom-of-the-crowd effect appears when the average of several judges’ estimates (e.g., estimates of the weight of an Ox; Galton, 1907) is more accurate than each indi...

This post is by Vera Hoorens (Leuven University) who recently wrote a paper entitled, "The Hubris Hypothesis: The Downside of Comparative Optimism Displays" , together with Carolien Van Damme , Marie Helweg-Larsen , and Constantine Sedikides . The paper is to appear in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism , guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. Vera Optimism has many positive consequences. This makes one expect that people encourage and admire other individuals’ optimism. We speculated, however, that the extent to which they do so depends on how these individuals display their optimism. They may express absolute optimism, saying that their future will be good, or comparative optimism, saying that their future will be better than other people’s futures. Based on the hubris hypothesis, we predicted that this distinction would determine how observers respond. The hubris hypothesis states that obs...

How do hope and optimism benefit our relationships? Does optimism predict post-release outcome for the incarcerated? Can I believe what I hope? Are children optimists or realists? Those were just some of the questions discussed at the hope and optimism midterm collaboratory in Estes Park, Colorado. At this interdisciplinary conference, social scientists and philosophers funded by the  Hope and Optimism Funding Initiative  presented their research. While the social science projects are halfway through their research, many philosophy projects are nearing the end. In this report, I will describe only a few projects and talks in more detail. (More information on the individual projects can be found  here .) In their project on optimism in children , Laura Hennefield and Lori Markson are investigating whether young children between three and six years of age are optimistically biased and whether this bias is affected by adverse environmental influences. They have des...

This post is by Lucy Allais (pictured above). Lucy teaches philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of California in San Diego. She partly works in the history of philosophy, on the work of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant (mostly on his metaphysics but she is increasingly interested in his moral and political philosophy), and partly on some topics in moral philosophy and moral psychology, such as forgiveness, resentment, and related moral emotions. In this post she writes about her research on forgiveness .  Augustine once said that he knows exactly what time is until anyone asks him, and it seems to me that something similar can be said about forgiveness. It is a concept we are pretty confident we understand, until one tries to give a philosophical account of it, at which point it seems to start dissolving, to the point that a lot of philosophers have thought it to be paradoxical and impossible to make sense of....

The AISB Convention is an annual conference covering the range of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. The convention is structured as a number of co-located symposia on a wide variety of topics, together with a number of plenary talks and events. This year’s convention took place on 4-6 April at the University of Sheffield and included a most interesting symposium on new approaches to depression. Below I briefly summarise the content of the symposium talks.   Joel Parthemore (University of Skövde, Sweden, pictured above) opened the symposium with his talk ‘Depression viewed from an enactive perspective: It’s the context, stupid.’ He pointed at some most commonly spread myths about depression, which contribute to the popular misunderstanding of the illness and may lead to stigmatization. These include a belief that depression always involves anhedonia or a belief that c...

Here I am reporting from "Optimism – Its Nature, Causes, and Effects" (#optimismbias2016), an interdisciplinary workshop organised by Anneli Jefferson and myself as part of the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project . It took place in Senate House, London, on 25-26th February 2016, and featured both philosophers and psychologists as speakers and participants. We wanted to investigate whether the notion of unrealistic optimism is coherent and how its different manifestations relate to one another. For instance, does the disposition to discount evidence against the success of one’s performance lead to the acquisition of positive illusions about the self? In addition, we wanted experts to comment on the empirical evidence suggesting that unrealistic optimism has both costs and benefits. On day 1, Tali Sharot (UCL) kicked off the workshop. Tali (pictured above) asked how the human brain forms optimistic beliefs and reported recent findings from her lab. She focused o...

I’m Neil Garrett , a PhD student at the Affective Brain Lab, University College London. I investigate biases in human decision making using a combination of approaches from psychology, economics and neuroscience. The term “depressive realism” was born out of a study conducted by the psychologists Alloy and Abramson in 1979. In this study they examined how people judged contingency between their actions (pressing a button, in this instance) and outcomes that subsequently materialized (a light flickering on). The crucial aspect was that there was often little or no contingency between actions and outcome; a light would flicker on sporadically and independently of any button pressing by the participant. Their results revealed however that whilst depressed patients were wise to this fact, non-depressed individuals displayed a tendency to overestimate how instrumental they were in causing the light to illuminate. Hence depressed individuals were seemingly more “realistic” than their ...

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...

On February 25th and 26th we will be hosting an interdisciplinary workshop on optimism at Senate House, London. The first day will be dedicated to the question what unrealistic optimism is and how it is caused. Why is it that we see such a wide-spread tendency to be unrealistically optimistic abour our own future? Are the primary factors motivational or cognitive? What processes allow us to think ‘it won’t happen to me’? We will be hearing about the brain processes underlying optimistic belief formation patterns and from Tali Sharot; and Bojana Kuzmanovic will be speaking about evidence that optimistically biased belief updating recruits brain areas associated with motivational processes. I will be considering the question whether the wide-spread tendency to be unrealistically optimistic about one’s own future can be explained by the fact that these belief patterns were adaptive in the past. Constantine Sedikides will be discussing unrealistically optimistic beliefs as one type...

In this post we hear about a project on problems and prospects for epistemic consequentialism whose principal investigators are Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (University of Kent), in the picture above, and Jeff Dunn (DePauw University). The project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and running from August 2014 to July 2016. So far, one paper has been published as part of the project—‘A Defence of Epistemic Consequentialism’, Philosophical Quarterly 64 (257), 2014. An edited volume entitled  Epistemic Consequentialism is   due to be published at the end of 2016 or early 2017 by Oxford University Press. It will feature papers by Clayton Littlejohn, Christopher Meacham, Michael Caie, Nancy Snow, Richard Pettigrew, Ralph Wedgewood, James Joyce, Hilary Kornblith, Julia Driver, Amanda MacAskill, Alejandro Perez Carballo, and Sophie Horowitz. The plan is to publish two other journal articles as part of the project. Kristoffer  has kindly agreed to answer a few questions. LB:...

The second year of ERC-funded  project PERFECT  (logo above) has just started and it is time to look back at what we have done so far and make plans for the future. What we have done so far Ema, Magdalena, Michael and I have had a very busy time, delivering talks, writing papers, and sponsoring a series of really interesting, interdisciplinary events, including a public engagement event on Sight, Sound and Mental Health for the Arts and Science Festival 2015, a Delusion lunchtime seminar with experts on delusion formation, and a session on the Function of Delusions as part of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Congress . We had three papers published open access: a review paper on costs and benefits of realism and optimism in Current Opinion in Psychiatry , a paper on the ethics of delusional belief in Erkenntnis , and a review paper on the nature and development of delusions in Philosophy Compass. Many more are in progress! We continued to dis...

In our everyday conception, an optimist is someone who looks at the bright side and expects good things to happen. The psychological literature distinguishes between different kinds of optimism: dispositional optimism and unrealistic optimism (also known as the optimism bias). Which of these types of optimism corresponds to our lay conception and how are they related to each other? Do these types of optimism differ in their effects?  Dispositional optimism is conceptualized as a general tendency to expect good outcomes and as a fairly stable personality trait. The optimism bias on the other hand is supposed to be a cognitive bias whereby people overestimate the likelihood of encountering specific positive events and underestimate the likelihood of encountering specific negative events. This unrealistic estimate can either be comparative or absolute. In the first case, we rate our own prospects as better than those of comparable others, in the second, we overestimate our...

In this post PhD student Magdalena Antrobus (pictured above) summarises her recent research for Project PERFECT concerning the phenomenon known in the empirical literature as ‘depressive realism’. Depressive realism is the thesis that people with depression make more realistic inferences than ‘healthy’ individuals (Alloy and Abramson 1988).  The term refers to the phenomenon discovered in 1979 in a series of experiments designed around assessing the judgement of contingency tasks (Alloy and Abramson 1979) . The assessments of control made by participants with symptoms of depression were more accurate than those made by ‘healthy’ individuals. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant, making the results conclusive. People with depressive symptoms judged their control over uncontrollable events correctly, whilst the judgements made by individuals without depressive symptoms have been shown to exhibit a positive cognitive bias. Could people who ...

This post is by Anneli Jefferson, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project. On June 27th, Nils Kürbis and Dan Adams hosted a workshop on falsity entitled ' Falsity – Not just Truth’s Poor Relation ' at Birkbeck (see picture of venue above). The lively workshop approached falsity in a number of thought-provoking ways. Those of us who don’t work in metaphysics take the concept of falsity for granted. But once you start thinking about what falsity is, numerous puzzles arise. If you assert that something is false, in other words, it is not the case, what makes that claim true? When we speak truly, we say how things are. If we speak falsely, things aren’t how we say they are. But doesn’t that mean that what we say is there is not there at all? So what are we talking about? It seems as if we are talking about nothing at all, so how can what we said even make sense? One response to this problem is that there ...