I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (...) are practical setting independent, cognitively govern other attitudes, and are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences have perceived normative orientation, are susceptible to free elaboration, and are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence. (shrink)

I investigate whether degreed beliefs are able to play the predictive, explanatory, and modeling roles that they are frequently taken to play. The investigation focuses on evidence—both from sources familiar in epistemology as well as recent work in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—of variability in agents' apparent degrees of belief. Although such variability has been noticed before, there has been little philosophical discussion of its breadth or of the psychological mechanisms underlying it. Once these are appreciated, the inadequacy of degrees (...) of belief becomes clear. I offer a theoretical alternative to degrees of belief, what I call the filter theory. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

It is argued that the intuitively sanctioned distinction between beliefs and non-belief states that play a role in the proximate causal history of beliefs is a distinction worth preserving in cognitive psychology. The intuitive distinction is argued to rest on a pair of features exhibited by beliefs but not by subdoxastic states. These are access to consciousness and inferential integration. Harman's view, which denies the distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states, is discussed and criticized.

Little is known about how the minds of dead agents are represented. In the current experiment, individuals with different types of explicit afterlife beliefs were asked in an implicit interview task whether various mental state types, as well as pure biological imperatives, continue after death. The results suggest that, regardless of one's explicit reports about personal consciousness after death, those who believe in some form of life after death implicitly represent dead agents' minds in the same way: psychobiological and perceptual (...) states cease while emotional, desire, and epistemic states continue. The findings are interpreted according to simulation constraints — because it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like to be dead, individuals will be most likely to attribute to dead agents those types of mental states that they cannot imagine being without. Such a model argues that it is natural to believe in life after death and social transmission serves principally to conceptually enrich intuitive conceptions of the afterlife. (shrink)

Religious people seem to believe things that range from the somewhat peculiar to the utterly bizarre. Or do they? According to a new paper by Neil Van Leeuwen, religious “credence” is nothing like mundane factual belief. It has, he claims, more in common with fictional imaginings. Religious folk do not really “believe”—in the ordinary sense of the word—what they profess to believe. Like fictional imaginings, but unlike factual beliefs, religious credences are activated only within specific settings. We argue that Van (...) Leeuwen’s thesis contradicts a wealth of data on religiously motivated behavior. By and large, the faithful genuinely believe what they profess to believe. Although many religions openly embrace a sense of mystery, in general this does not prevent the attribution of beliefs to religious people. Many of the features of religious belief that Van Leeuwen alludes to, like invulnerability to refutation and incoherence, are characteristic of irrational beliefs in general and actually betray... (shrink)

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8–17 years) and adults (19–71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants (...) aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven‐year‐olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5‐year‐olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated—a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence. (shrink)

Implicit attitudes are mental states that appear sometimes to cause agents to act in ways that conflict with their considered beliefs. Implicit attitudes are usually held to be mere associations between representations. Recently, however, some philosophers have suggested that they are, or are very like, ordinary beliefs: they are apt to feature in properly inferential processing. This claim is important, in part because there is good reason to think that the vocabulary in which we make moral assessments of ourselves and (...) of others is keyed to folk psychological concepts, like ‘belief’, and not to concepts that feature only in scientific psychology: if implicit attitudes are beliefs there is a prima facie case for thinking that they can serve as the basis for particular kinds of moral assessment. In this paper I argue that while implicit attitudes have propositional structure, their sensitivity and responsiveness to other mental representations is too patchy and fragmented for them to properly be considered beliefs. Instead, they are a sui generis kind of mental state, a state I dub patchy endorsements. (shrink)

Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different conceptions of death. They often acknowledged that functioning ceases at death and offered appropriate (...) biological justifications for that judgment. However, they also claimed that functioning continues after death and offered appropriate religious justifications. The tendency to claim that functioning continues after death was more frequent among older children than younger children, more frequent in the context of the religious narrative as opposed to the secular narrative and more frequent with respect to mental processes than bodily processes. Particularly among older children, two distinct conceptions of death appear to co-exist: a biological conception in which death implies the cessation of living processes and a metaphysical conception in which death marks the beginning of the afterlife. (shrink)

The scientific knowledge needed to engage with policy issues like climate change, vaccination, and stem cell research often conflicts with our intuitive theories of the world. How resilient are our intuitive theories in the face of contradictory scientific knowledge? Here, we present evidence that intuitive theories in 10 domains of knowledge—astronomy, evolution, fractions, genetics, germs, matter, mechanics, physiology, thermodynamics, and waves—persist more than four decades beyond the acquisition of a mutually exclusive scientific theory. Participants were asked to verify two types (...) of scientific statements as quickly as possible: those that are consistent with intuition and those that involve the same conceptual relations but are inconsistent with intuition. Older adults were as accurate as younger adults at verifying both types of statements, but the lag in response times between intuition-consistent and intuition-inconsistent statements was significantly larger for older adults than for younger adults. This lag persisted even among professional scientists. Overall, these results suggest that the scientific literacy needed to engage with topics of global importance may be constrained by patterns of reasoning that emerge in childhood but persist long thereafter. (shrink)

Dual Process Theories of reasoning posit that judgments are mediated by both fast, automatic processes and more deliberate, analytic ones. A critical, but unanswered question concerns the issue of monitoring and control: When do reasoners rely on the first, intuitive output and when do they engage more effortful thinking? We hypothesised that initial, intuitive answers are accompanied by a metacognitive experience, called the Feeling of Rightness, which can signal when additional analysis is needed. In separate experiments, reasoners completed one of (...) four tasks: conditional reasoning, a three-term variant of conditional reasoning, problems used to measure base rate neglect, or a syllogistic reasoning task. For each task, participants were instructed to provide an initial, intuitive response to the problem along with an assessment of the rightness of that answer. They were then allowed as much time as needed to reconsider their initial answer and provide a final answer. In each experiment, we observed a robust relationship between the FOR and two measures of analytic thinking: low FOR was associated with longer rethinking times and an increased probability of answer change. In turn, FOR judgments were consistently predicted by the fluency with which the initial answer was produced, providing a link to the wider literature on metamemory. These data support a model in which a metacognitive judgment about a first, initial model determines the extent of analytic engagement. (shrink)

Scientific cognition is a hard-won achievement, both from a historical point of view and a developmental point of view. Here, I review seven facets of lay cognition that run counter to, and often impede, scientific cognition: incompatible folk theories, missing ontologies, tolerance for shallow explanations, tolerance for contradictory explanations, privileging explanation over empirical data, privileging testimony over empirical data, and misconceiving the nature of science itself. Most of these facets have been investigated independent of the others, and I propose directions (...) for future research that might integrate them so as to explore potential commonalities among seemingly disparate obstacles to science learning, as well as potential strategies for bridging lay cognition and scientific cognition in the context of science education. (shrink)

Statements of the form ''Osorno is in Chile'' were presented in colors that made them easy or difficult to read against a white background and participants judged the truth of the statement. Moderately visible statements were judged as true at chance level, whereas highly visible statements were judged as true significantly above chance level. We conclude that perceptual fluency affects judgments of truth.

Thanks to the exchange of arguments, groups outperform individuals on some tasks, such as solving logical problems. However, these results stem from experiments conducted among Westerners and they could be due to cultural particularities such as tolerance of contradiction and approval of public debate. Other cultures, collectivistic cultures in particular, are said to frown on argumentation. Moreover, some influential intellectual movements, such as Confucianism, disapprove of argumentation. In two experiments, the hypothesis that Easterners might not share the benefits of argumentation (...) was tested. In Experiment 1, Japanese participants had to solve a standard logical problem individually and then in groups. They performed significantly better in groups. In Experiment 2, Japanese participants had to estimate the weight of various animals. They did so individually, then after learning of another participant's estimates, then after discussing these estimates with the other participant, and then indi.. (shrink)