Imperfect Cognitions

As part of the Knowledge Resistance project, a conference was organised in Stockholm from 23rd to 25th August 2022 to bring together philosophers, psychologists, media studies researchers, and journalists and discuss recent work on misinformation. This event was organised by Åsa Wikforss ( interviewed on knowledge resistance here ).  Stockholm University, Albano In this report, I will summarise some of the talks. DAY 1 In his talk entitled “Resistance to Knowledge and Vulnerability to Deception”, Christopher F. Chabris (Geisinger Health System) argued that we need to understand our vulnerabilities to deception in order to appreciate the social aspects of knowledge resistance. He illustrated with many interesting examples of famous deceptions and frauds how deceivers exploit blind spots in our attention and some of our cognitive habits.  Christopher Chabris For instance, we tend to judge something as accurate if it is predictable and consistent. We make predictions all t...

This post is Katherine Hawley , Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. Here she introduces her new book, How To Be Trustworthy (OUP 2019). I set out to write a book about trust, that powerful attitude we sometimes adopt towards other people, towards social institutions, sometimes even towards inanimate objects. But instead I ended up writing a book about trustworthiness, and about the ways in which tough circumstances can make it difficult for us to be trustworthy, no matter how well-intentioned we are. I was led from trust to trustworthiness by thinking about situations where trust is absent, and about what can happen when trust is misplaced. When we think about misplaced trust, we often think first about deception or inadequacy: our trust is misplaced if we direct it towards dishonest manipulators, or towards well-meaning types who nevertheless cannot live up to our expectations. Either way, when we’re faced with untrustworthy people, distrust rath...

This post is by Joël van der Weele and Peter Schwardmann. Joël (picture above) is an associate professor at the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and political Decision making ( CREED ) at the University of Amsterdam, and a fellow at the Tinbergen Institute and the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition center. His research is takes place on the intersection between economics and psychology, using the tools of experimental economics and game theory. Topics include motivated cognition in economic decisions, the interaction of laws and social norms and the measurement of beliefs. Peter  (picture above) is a behavioural economist at LMU Munich. He works on belief formation and the consequences of belief biases in markets. As readers of this blog will probably know, belief formation does not always reflect a search for truth. According to an “interactionist view” of cognition, the production of arguments and the persuasion of others leads beliefs to become convenie...