Imperfect Cognitions

 Today’s post is by Brady Wagoner, Professor of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University, Denmark. He published a recent article in Current Opinion in Psychology , together with Maja Sødinge Jørgensen and Kirstine Pahuus, titled “Conspiracy theories through the lens of collective memory”.   Brady Wagoner In psychology, c onspiracy theories are often treated as symptoms of faulty thinking: cognitive shortcuts gone wrong , paranoia, or failures of information literacy. This article develops an alternative approach through the lens of collective memory, which refers to the socially shared ways groups reconstruct the past to make sense of the present and anticipate the future. This perspective focuses on what conspiracy theories do, rather than what is wrong with those who believe them. It shifts attention from individual cognition as such to how thinking is embedded within history, culture, and social relations.   The article begins wi...

In this post Robin Scaife reports from the conference Bias in Context . On the 25th and 26th of January 2017 the University of Sheffield hosted the 3rd in a series of 4 conferences on Bias in Context. This workshop was supported by the Leverhulme Trust as part of a research project grant on bias and blame. The previous two conferences in the series had focused on how to understand the relationship between psychological and structural explanations. This time the theme was Interpersonal Interventions and Collective Action. The goal was to look beyond individualistic approaches to changing biases and examine how interpersonal interactions and collective action can be used to combat bias. Experts came from both Philosophy and Psychology and many of those attending also had practical experience of leading diversity training sessions. The conference began with Dr Evelyn Carter (UCLA) giving a talk about her ongoing research into applying theories of motivation to confronting bia...

In this post Kourken Michaelian and Chloe Wall report from the workshop New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory. Funded by a generous grant from the University of Otago 's Division of Humanities, researchers from Australasia and Europe gathered in Dunedin, New Zealand on 25-26 October 2016 for a workshop on New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory . The workshop, organized by Kourken Michaelian, was the second of two events linked to a planned book—edited by Michaelian, Dorothea Debus , and Denis Perrin —featuring papers describing new lines of research in this burgeoning field; the first was held at the University of Grenoble earlier in 2016 as part of a broader interdisciplinary event. The two days of the workshop included eight talks. On the first day, Kourken Michaelian’s “Confabulating, misremembering, relearning: The simulation theory of memory and unsuccessful remembering” argued against taxonomies of memory errors that are based on the causal theory of m...