Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, I interview Imperfect Cognitions network member Jules Holroyd, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the department of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust funded Bias and Blame project . The project runs from 2014-2017 and the team includes senior lecturer Tom Stafford and postdoctoral researcher Robin Scaife in the department of psychology, and PhD student Andreas Bunge in the department of philosophy. SS: The Bias and Blame project investigates the relationship between moral interactions, such as blame, and the manifestation of implicit bias. How did you become interested in this topic, and has there been much previous research in this area? JH: The project looks principally at whether moral interactions, such as blaming, impact on the expression of implicit racial bias. The interest in this   question arose out of the philosophical debates about responsibility for bias, in which two claims seemed

I’m delighted to join the philosophy department of the University of Birmingham as a Research Fellow working on Project PERFECT as it enters its third year. In recent research I’ve been investigating the nature of the implicit/explicit distinction, and considering whether there is a role for agency when implicit cognition drives behaviour. I was awarded my PhD earlier this year, with a thesis on implicit social bias. It’s previously been argued that implicit cognitions do not express our evaluative agency, and that we cannot be held responsible for their manifestation. I’ve argued that just because some cognition bears some or all of the putative features of the implicit, this is not a reliable heuristic for its exclusion from being considered agential. Agency may involve an interplay between implicit and explicit processes, and whether implicit features count as agential might only be illuminated by zooming out and viewing agency as extended over time, against the back

Today's blog post is an interview by Project PERFECT research fellow Kathy Puddifoot with Sarah K. Robins (pictured below), an expert on false memories and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. KP: You are an expert on memory. How did you become interested in this topic? SR: I became interested in memory as I was starting to put together a dissertation back in graduate school. Originally, my interest was in the personal/subpersonal distinction but I was spinning my wheels a bit. My advisor, Carl Craver, posed a question to help get me going: are memory traces personal or subpersonal? In pursuit of that question (still a difficult one to answer), my interest shifted to memory itself. There were so many interesting philosophical questions about memory—and so little connection with the vast amount of research on memory in both psychology and neuroscience. I was excited about how little work had yet been done on these intersections and tha

During my first year on Project PERFECT I have had the opportunity to explore a number of avenues of research relating to the epistemic benefits of imperfect cognitions. Falsity-Dependent Truths in Memory and Social Cognition I have been collaborating with Lisa on a project on memory distortions; cases in which people appear to remember things from the past but the memories are inaccurate. The memories often have a kernel of truth but at least some of the details are false. Many previous discussions of the phenomenon have focused on evolutionary advantages and psychological gains associated with having false memories. For example, it has been emphasised that having false beliefs about the quality of one’s own performance on a task could have psychological benefits by increasing our wellbeing. Our focus has instead been on identifying epistemic gains associated with having false memories. For example, it has been argued that many false memories are the result o

In this post Andrea Polonioli interviews Ralph Hertwig (pictured below), director of the Center for Adaptive Rationality  at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. AP: According to popular accounts offered in the field of judgment and decision-making, people are prone to cognitive biases, and such biases are conducive to maladaptive behaviour. Based on your research, to what extent the claim that cognitive biases are costly is warranted by available evidence? If you had to identify one particular bias that is especially worrisome, because it typically results in negative real life outcomes, which one would this be? RH: This is a hotly debated topic in research on behavioral decision making and beyond. Many cognitive biases have been defined as such because they violate coherence norms, under the assumption that a single syntactical rule such as consistency, transitivity, the conjunction rule, or Bayes’ rule suffices to evaluate behavior. I believe that such

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 Gunn,

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