Tania Lombrozo
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 484366 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Tania Lombrozo |
| NOMBRES | Tania |
| APELLIDO | Lombrozo |
| FIRMA | LOMBROZO T |
| AFILIACIONES | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5637-1431 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Judgments of Responsibility for Inequality
Decades of psychological research have led to a better understanding of the factors that influence people’s causal explanations of inequalities, such as the racial wealth gap. But our understanding of the psychology of inequality remains limited because this research has largely focused on causal and retrospective judgments. In this article, we argue that two distinctions are valuable for clarifying judgments of responsibility for inequality: the…
How laypeople evaluate scientific explanations containing jargon
Building compressed causal models of the world
A given causal system can be represented in a variety of ways. How do agents determine which variables to include in their causal representations, and at what level of granularity? Using techniques from Bayesian networks, information theory, and decision theory, we develop a formal theory according to which causal representations reflect a trade-off between compression and informativeness, where the optimal trade-off depends on the decision-theor…
Are ethical explanations explanatory? Meta-ethical beliefs shape judgments about explanations for social change
Tell me your (cognitive) budget, and I’ll tell you what you value
Learning From Aggregated Opinion
The capacity to leverage information from others’ opinions is a hallmark of human cognition. Consequently, past research has investigated how we learn from others’ testimony. Yet a distinct form of social information— aggregated opinion—increasingly guides our judgments and decisions. We investigated how people learn from such information by conducting three experiments with participants recruited online within the United States ( N = 886) compar…
Minimally counterintuitive stimuli trigger greater curiosity than merely improbable stimuli
People recognize and condone their own morally motivated reasoning
People often engage in biased reasoning, favoring some beliefs over others even when the result is a departure from impartial or evidence-based reasoning. Psychologists have long assumed that people are unaware of these biases and operate under an "illusion of objectivity." We identify an important domain of life in which people harbor little illusion about their biases - when they are biased for moral reasons. For instance, people endorse and fe…
Philosophy instruction changes views on moral controversies by decreasing reliance on intuition
What changes people's judgments on moral issues, such as the ethics of abortion or eating meat? On some views, moral judgments result from deliberation, such that reasons and reasoning should be primary drivers of moral change. On other views, moral judgments reflect intuition, with reasons offered as post-hoc rationalizations. We test predictions of these accounts by investigating whether exposure to a moral philosophy course (vs. control course…
Seeking evidence and explanation signals religious and scientific commitments
Experiments on causal exclusion
Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive ... understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople ar…
Motivated to learn
Many explanations have a distinctive, positive phenomenology: receiving or generating these explanations feels satisfying. Accordingly, we might expect this feeling of explanatory satisfaction to reinforce and motivate inquiry. Across five studies, we investigate how explanatory satisfaction plays this role: by motivating and reinforcing inquiry quite generally ("brute motivation" account), or by selectively guiding inquiry to support useful lear…
How “is” shapes “ought” for folk-biological concepts
Deciding to be authentic
Deliberative analysis enables us to weigh features, simulate futures, and arrive at good, tractable decisions. So why do we so often eschew deliberation, and instead rely on more intuitive, gut responses? We propose that intuition might be prescribed for some decisions because people's folk theory of decision-making accords a special role to authenticity, which is associated with intuitive choice. Five pre-registered experiments find evidence in …
If it's important, then I’m curious
Curiosity is considered essential for learning and sustained engagement, yet stimulating curiosity in educational contexts remains a challenge. Can people's curiosity about a scientific topic be stimulated by providing evidence that knowledge about the topic has potential value to society? Here, we show that increasing perceptions of 'social usefulness' regarding a scientific topic also increases curiosity and subsequent information search. Our r…
The Future of Women in Psychological Science
There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field’s investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women’s career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issu…
Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief
When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one's friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and found that, across a diverse set of everyday si…
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4
A functional approach to explanation-seeking curiosity
Why do some (and only some) observations prompt people to ask "why?" We propose a functional approach to "Explanation-Seeking Curiosity" (ESC): the state that motivates people to seek an explanation. If ESC tends to prompt explanation search when doing so is likely to be beneficial, we can use prior work on the functional consequences of explanation search to derive "forward-looking" candidate triggers of ESC-those that concern expectations about…
Science demands explanation, religion tolerates mystery
Some claims (e.g., that the Earth goes around the Sun) seem to call out for explanation: they make us wonder "why?". For other claims (e.g., that God exists), one might accept that the explanation is a mystery. In the present research, we investigate "need for explanation" and "mystery acceptability" across the domains of science and religion, as a window onto differences between scientific and religious cognition more broadly. In Study 1, we fin…
Structural thinking about social categories
Many theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors that underlie kind membership and explain properties of category members. Across three studies (N = 281), we document the characteristics of an alternative form of construal according to which the properties of social kinds are seen as products of structural factors: stable, external constraints that obtain due to the kind's social position. Internalist …
Transformations and Transfer
Previous research suggests that preschoolers struggle with understanding abstract relations and with reasoning by analogy. Four experiments find, in contrast, that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 168) are surprisingly adept at relational and analogical reasoning within a causal context. In earlier studies preschoolers routinely favored images that share thematic or perceptual commonalities with a target image (object matches) over choices that match the …
Explanation classification depends on understanding
The development of structural thinking about social categories
Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking pink") in structural terms, locating an object of explanation within a larger structure and identifying structural co…
Sources of developmental change in the efficiency of information search
Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults search for information. To do so, we develop a hierarchical version o…
Occam's rattle
A growing literature suggests that generating and evaluating explanations is a key mechanism for learning and inference, but little is known about how children generate and select competing explanations. This study investigates whether young children prefer explanations that are simple, where simplicity is quantified as the number of causes invoked in an explanation, and how this preference is reconciled with probability information. Both prescho…
The development of structural thinking about social categories
Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking pink") in structural terms, locating an object of explanation within a larger structure and identifying structural co…
Sources of developmental change in the efficiency of information search
Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults search for information. To do so, we develop a hierarchical version o…
The Instrumental Value of Explanations
Scientific and 'intuitive' or 'folk' theories are typically characterized as serving three critical functions: prediction, explanation, and control. While prediction and control have clear instrumental value, the value of explanation is less transparent. This paper reviews an emerging body of research from the cognitive sciences suggesting that the process of seeking, generating, and evaluating explanations in fact contributes to future predictio…
Explanation classification depends on understanding
The structure and function of explanations
Causal–explanatory pluralism
The Campaign for Concepts
When it comes to the advertising campaign for concepts, most philosophers and psychologists agree: “Concepts: You can’t explain thought without ’em!” But that’s where agreement typically ends. Once you get beyond the slogans, philosophers and psychologists interested in conceptual representation have generated a variety of proposals that share little more than a commitment to the value – and sometimes necessity – of a theory of concepts. In his n…
The Instrumental Value of Explanations
Scientific and 'intuitive' or 'folk' theories are typically characterized as serving three critical functions: prediction, explanation, and control. While prediction and control have clear instrumental value, the value of explanation is less transparent. This paper reviews an emerging body of research from the cognitive sciences suggesting that the process of seeking, generating, and evaluating explanations in fact contributes to future predictio…
Occam's rattle
A growing literature suggests that generating and evaluating explanations is a key mechanism for learning and inference, but little is known about how children generate and select competing explanations. This study investigates whether young children prefer explanations that are simple, where simplicity is quantified as the number of causes invoked in an explanation, and how this preference is reconciled with probability information. Both prescho…
Sources of developmental change in the efficiency of information search
Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults search for information. To do so, we develop a hierarchical version o…
The development of structural thinking about social categories
Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking pink") in structural terms, locating an object of explanation within a larger structure and identifying structural co…
A functional approach to explanation-seeking curiosity
Why do some (and only some) observations prompt people to ask "why?" We propose a functional approach to "Explanation-Seeking Curiosity" (ESC): the state that motivates people to seek an explanation. If ESC tends to prompt explanation search when doing so is likely to be beneficial, we can use prior work on the functional consequences of explanation search to derive "forward-looking" candidate triggers of ESC-those that concern expectations about…
Science demands explanation, religion tolerates mystery
Some claims (e.g., that the Earth goes around the Sun) seem to call out for explanation: they make us wonder "why?". For other claims (e.g., that God exists), one might accept that the explanation is a mystery. In the present research, we investigate "need for explanation" and "mystery acceptability" across the domains of science and religion, as a window onto differences between scientific and religious cognition more broadly. In Study 1, we fin…
Structural thinking about social categories
Many theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors that underlie kind membership and explain properties of category members. Across three studies (N = 281), we document the characteristics of an alternative form of construal according to which the properties of social kinds are seen as products of structural factors: stable, external constraints that obtain due to the kind's social position. Internalist …
Transformations and Transfer
Previous research suggests that preschoolers struggle with understanding abstract relations and with reasoning by analogy. Four experiments find, in contrast, that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 168) are surprisingly adept at relational and analogical reasoning within a causal context. In earlier studies preschoolers routinely favored images that share thematic or perceptual commonalities with a target image (object matches) over choices that match the …
Explanation classification depends on understanding
The Future of Women in Psychological Science
There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field’s investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women’s career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issu…
Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief
When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one's friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and found that, across a diverse set of everyday si…
Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4
Experiments on causal exclusion
Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive ... understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which it relies. Instead, we find that laypeople ar…
Motivated to learn
Many explanations have a distinctive, positive phenomenology: receiving or generating these explanations feels satisfying. Accordingly, we might expect this feeling of explanatory satisfaction to reinforce and motivate inquiry. Across five studies, we investigate how explanatory satisfaction plays this role: by motivating and reinforcing inquiry quite generally ("brute motivation" account), or by selectively guiding inquiry to support useful lear…
How “is” shapes “ought” for folk-biological concepts
Deciding to be authentic
Deliberative analysis enables us to weigh features, simulate futures, and arrive at good, tractable decisions. So why do we so often eschew deliberation, and instead rely on more intuitive, gut responses? We propose that intuition might be prescribed for some decisions because people's folk theory of decision-making accords a special role to authenticity, which is associated with intuitive choice. Five pre-registered experiments find evidence in …
If it's important, then I’m curious
Curiosity is considered essential for learning and sustained engagement, yet stimulating curiosity in educational contexts remains a challenge. Can people's curiosity about a scientific topic be stimulated by providing evidence that knowledge about the topic has potential value to society? Here, we show that increasing perceptions of 'social usefulness' regarding a scientific topic also increases curiosity and subsequent information search. Our r…
Minimally counterintuitive stimuli trigger greater curiosity than merely improbable stimuli
People recognize and condone their own morally motivated reasoning
People often engage in biased reasoning, favoring some beliefs over others even when the result is a departure from impartial or evidence-based reasoning. Psychologists have long assumed that people are unaware of these biases and operate under an "illusion of objectivity." We identify an important domain of life in which people harbor little illusion about their biases - when they are biased for moral reasons. For instance, people endorse and fe…
Philosophy instruction changes views on moral controversies by decreasing reliance on intuition
What changes people's judgments on moral issues, such as the ethics of abortion or eating meat? On some views, moral judgments result from deliberation, such that reasons and reasoning should be primary drivers of moral change. On other views, moral judgments reflect intuition, with reasons offered as post-hoc rationalizations. We test predictions of these accounts by investigating whether exposure to a moral philosophy course (vs. control course…
Seeking evidence and explanation signals religious and scientific commitments
Building compressed causal models of the world
A given causal system can be represented in a variety of ways. How do agents determine which variables to include in their causal representations, and at what level of granularity? Using techniques from Bayesian networks, information theory, and decision theory, we develop a formal theory according to which causal representations reflect a trade-off between compression and informativeness, where the optimal trade-off depends on the decision-theor…
Psychology (28 obras) · Epistemology (20 obras) · Social Psychology (20 obras) · Cognitive psychology (17 obras) · Philosophy (13 obras) · Computer Science (12 obras) · Child and Animal Learning Development (11 obras) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (11 obras) · Cognition (9 obras) · Cognitive science (9 obras)