Imperfect Cognitions

My name is Andrea Polonioli and I recently joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow. I am extremely excited to be working under the mentorship of Lisa Bortolotti and on this fantastic project exploring the Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cognitions and Thoughts ( PERFECT ). Until now, most of my research has focused on the following two questions: What does it mean to be rational? To what extent are we rational? During my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, I explored these questions mainly considering literature on judgment and decision-making in nonclinical populations. As it turns out, researchers in the field of judgment and decision-making often claim that to be rational means to reason according to formal principles based on logic, probability theory, and decision theory. In a few papers of mine, I defended the claim that formal principles of rationality are too narrow and abstract, and that behaviour sh...

In this post I interview Maria Bavetta, co-founder of Maternal OCD . LB: Could you describe maternal OCD, and tell us how frequent it is? Does it often go undiagnosed? How have you become interested in it? MB: Nearly 13 years ago I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Physically it was incredibly easy however that was where the ease stopped. By the time my daughter was three months old I was experiencing terrifying thoughts (obsessions) and repeatedly carrying out exhausting behaviours (compulsions) – mentally I was very unwell. I was suffering from perinatal Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Strictly speaking this is OCD during the perinatal period (conception to a year post birth), however the impact can last longer than that finite period. Perinatal OCD is an anxiety disorder that can impact up to 2.5% of women and according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Perinatal OCD leaflet the main symptoms of Perinatal OCD are: Obsessions . These are unwanted thoughts, i...

The third year of our ERC-funded project PERFECT (logo above) has just started and it is time to look back at what we have done in the last year, and make plans for the future. What we have done in our second year The PERFECT team delivered many academic and outreach talks in the UK and internationally, wrote papers, and organised a series of interdisciplinary events sponsored by the project, including a mini-workshop on Belief and Emotion in November 2015, a public engagement event called Tricked by Memory  for the Arts and Science Festival in March 2016, and a symposium entitled Explaining Delusions at the International Congress of Psychology in Yokohama in July 2016. The main event was our first project workshop, PERFECT 2016, on False but Useful Beliefs , in February 2016. We had several papers accepted which will be published open access, including Ema's " Malfunction Defended " in Synthese;  a chapter on what makes beliefs delusional by Rachel G...

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...

Michael Bishop is a philosopher at Florida State University. He wrote, with J.D. Trout, Epistemology and the Psychology ofHuman Judgment (Oxford, 2005). And more recently he ’ s written The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychologyof Well-Being (Oxford 2015). The goal in both books is the same: Build a theory that makes sense of what both philosophers and psychologists have to say about normative matters. Bishop is currently working on a number of projects, including one that aims to show how we might improve how we teach critical thinking. You can find more of his writings at his blog . There ’ s an old yarn about six people groping in the dark to study an elephant: The tusk was thought a spear, the side a wall, the trunk a snake, the leg a tree, the ear a fan, and the tail a rope. A happy life is like the elephant. It consists of many varied parts. And we philosophers, groping in the dark, hold fast to our little corner of the elephant, confident that we ’ ve go...

My name is Matteo Colombo . I am an Assistant Professor in the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics and Philosophy of Science , and in the Department of Philosophy at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. My work is mostly in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, in the philosophy of science, and in moral psychology. I am interested in questions about evidence and explanation, and in how resources from the sciences can help address philosophical puzzles about mind and moral behaviour. I pursue these interests by combining experimental and non-experimental methods. In a recent experiment study , Leandra Bucher , Yoel Inbar , and I investigated how moral value can bias explanatory judgement. Our general goal was to assess the empirical adequacy of a popular view in the philosophy of science, which contends that scientific reasoning is objective to the extent that the appraisal of scientific hypotheses is not influenced by moral, political, or economic values, but only by the avai...

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...