Research in the Concepts & Cognition Lab focuses on a variety of topics in high-level cognition, including explanation, learning, causal reasoning, moral reasoning, concepts and categorization, and folk epistemology. To get a sense for the diversity of past and current lab interests, you can look at lab publications or the descriptions of current lab members. What unites this diverse set of topics is an interdisciplinary, cognitive science approach informed particularly by psychology and philosophy. Below are descriptions of three topics of ongoing interest.
Explanation and understanding
Why study explanation? One argument comes from its ubiquity. We spend a great deal of time seeking, generating, and evaluating explanations. If you eavesdrop on others or attend to your own conversations, it won’t be long before you hear an explanation, or at least a request for one. Why is your roommate angry? Why did the cake turn out too dry? Why is there traffic at 3pm? And yes, even “why are we here?” The tendency to seek explanations is so pervasive that some psychologists have posited an “explanation urge” (Kosslyn, 1995), or a “drive to explain” (Gopnik, 2000). The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould allegedly characterized humans as “the primates who tell stories,” and many of these stories take the form of explanations.
Thinking about explanation raises a number of important questions. Why are we so driven to explain? What counts as an explanation, and what makes some explanations better than others? Are there different kinds of explanations? What role does explaining play in processes such as learning, inference, and categorization? These questions highlight a second reason to study explanation: doing so can be a valuable window onto other foundational aspects of cognition.
More recently, many people have become interested in explanation in the context of artificial intelligence. How can AI systems generate explanations that support human understanding or decision making, and what would it take for an artificial mind to itself possess explanatory understanding? These are questions we’ve just begun to tackle.
If you’d like to read more about lab research on explanation, this review paper is a good place to start.
The nature of belief
Psychologists spend a great deal of time studying beliefs, and philosophers spend a great deal of time debating what they are. But a lot remains mysterious about the nature of belief. What sorts of things are beliefs? Do they come in different varieties? What roles do they play in human cognition and behavior?
This line of work explores many of the questions that have traditionally fallen within the domain of normative epistemology, but reconfigured as empirical questions about human cognition. For example, one normative debate within epistemology concerns the role of moral considerations in belief: Should beliefs be based on evidence alone, or might moral considerations shift thresholds for evidence, or provide independent reasons to adopt a (morally good) belief? This question about the ethics of belief has descriptive analogs: What role do moral considerations play in the beliefs that people hold? And what role do moral considerations play in which beliefs they take to be justified? As a second example, epistemologists debate the relationship between categorical beliefs (“A democrat will win the next election”) and credences, or subjective probabilities (“A democrat will win the next election” with probability .90). Are these different types of beliefs? Or different ways of construing beliefs? If so, do different construals have different psychological consequences (for instance, for information search and belief revision)?
You can read about some puzzles of belief in this short opinion piece. And you can get a sense for some of the questions that arise in the folk ethics of belief in this review paper.
Scientific and religious cognition
Does the human mind have more than one mode of operation? For example, do we sometimes function like intuitive scientists (who form their beliefs based on evidence), but at other times like intuitive lawyers (who come up with the evidence to support their desired conclusions)? How do these different modes relate to each other and interact? One way to get at variation in explanations and beliefs is to investigate two potentially very different modes of cognition. This is one motivation for studying scientific and religious cognition that relates closely to the two topics described above: by understanding the similarities and differences between explanations (or beliefs) across domains, we can get some leverage on the nature of explanation (or belief). For example, do some religious beliefs involve a different kind of attitude, more like faith?
A second motivation for studying scientific and religious cognition comes from their societal consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how the psychology of belief can have important implications for public health. Beliefs about vaccines, climate change, and many other topics are scientific in content, but can potentially play psychological roles more akin to political or religious beliefs, with important connections to values and social identity. How can we best characterize such beliefs, their influence on behavior, and the mechanisms by which they are revised?
For an example of research on scientific versus religious explanations, check out this lab paper. For an example of research on scientific versus religious beliefs, check out this one.