Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Sacha Altay, Emma de Araujo and Hugo Mercier. Sacha Altay is doing his PHD thesis at the Jean Nicod Institute on misinformation from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective. Emma de Araujo is a master student in Sociology doing an internship at the Jean Nicod Institute in the Evolution and Social Cognition Team . Hugo Mercier is a research scientist at the CNRS (Jean Nicod Institute) working on argumentation and how we evaluate communicated information.  Why do people share fake news? We believe others to be more easily swayed by fake news than us ( Corbu et al., 2020 ; Jang & Kim, 2018 ), thus an intuitive explanation is that people share fake news because they are gullible. It makes sense that if people can’t tell truths from falsehoods, they will inadvertently share falsehoods often enough. In fact, laypeople are quite good at detecting fake news ( Pennycook et al., 2019 , 2020 ; Pennycook & Rand, 2019 ) and, more generally, they don’t get fooled e...

Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic  (Photo ©Dorte_Jelstrup) Today's post is by Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic, who is a postdoc at the Section for Philosophy and Science Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. It has become quite trendy to argue that that it is okay (or maybe even required) to make people feel uncomfortable because of their biases or prejudices. In my new paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Right to Feel Comfortable: Implicit Bias and the Moral Potential of Discomfort , I discuss this new trend by arguing that there are good reasons (from affective neuroscience) for why we should curb our enthusiasm when it comes to the moral potential of discomfort. It certainly can be justified to call people out for their biased behavior and we need not comfort every display of what I call “awareness discomfort”. But in such situations we shouldn’t expect to be changing the receiver’s moral mindset.  This is the first out of two papers on the feelings of disc...

Today's post is by Alex Madva ( California Center for Ethics & Policy , California State Polytechnic University) who is introducing a new book co-edited with Erin Beeghly (University of Utah), entitled An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (Routledge 2020). Alex Madva In the wake of what might be the largest protests in American history responding to police and vigilante brutality against the black community, the point – or pointlessness – of “Implicit Bias Training” has taken on renewed urgency. Although I do implicit bias training myself, my co-editor Erin Beeghly and I share critics’ concerns: the trainings are “ too short, too simplistic ,” and too often function just to let organizations “check a box” to protect against litigation, rather than spark real change.  Erin Beeghly But “training” is just another word for “education,” and all kinds of education can be done well or poorly. If implicit bias is one important piece of a l...

Today’s post is by Ema Sullivan-Bissett , who is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Here she overviews her paper ‘ Unimpaired Abduction to Alien Abduction: Lessons on Delusion Formation ’, recently published in Philosophical Psychology. Last year, when millions of people had marked themselves as attending a storming of Area 51, Ema also wrote about her research for the Birmingham Perspective . In the academic year 2013–14, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on Lisa Bortolotti’s AHRC project on the Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions . Towards the end of the Project, I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to be a Visiting Researcher at Macquarie University’s ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and Its Disorders. Professor John Sutton hosted me for that month, but I was also lucky to spend some time with Professor Max Coltheart , and interviewed him for this blog. In the first part of the interview we talked about delusion for...