Kara Weisman
Biographic Data
| ID | 89515 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kara Weisman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kara |
| FAMILY NAME | Weisman |
| SIGNATURE | WEISMAN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3706-7554 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Beliefs About the Development of Mental Life
Caregiving relationships with infants and children are among the most common and most complex human social interactions. Adults’ perceptions of children’s mental capacities have important consequences for the well-being of children in their care—particularly in the first few years of life, when children’s communication skills are limited and caregivers must infer children’s rapidly developing thoughts, feelings, and needs. In a series of studies,…
Belief, culture, & development: Insights from studying the development of religious beliefs and behaviors
Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths
Significance The sensory presence of gods and spirits is central to many of the religions that have shaped human history—in fact, many people of faith report having experienced such events. But these experiences are poorly understood by social scientists and rarely studied empirically. We present a multiple-discipline, multiple-methods program of research involving thousands of people from diverse cultures and religions which demonstrates that tw…
To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding
Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completi…
The sense of presence: Lessons from virtual reality
The sense of presence—or the sense of “being there”—is a poorly understood phenomenon, especially in the case of “unseen others,” e.g., God. We used the tools of virtual reality (VR) to explore the effects of active imagination in creating a sense of presence of an ambiguously real other. We found that adding a visual representation was more effective than verbal language alone in evoking a sense of social presence in a ten-minute intervention, t…
Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures
God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy
on May 21 2020 (see record 2020-36018-001). In the article, the phrase Mixed Effects in the table title for Tables 1-3 and Tables 6-8 is incorrect. The corrected phrase should appear instead as Fixed Effects. All versions of this article have been corrected.] In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is c…
What anthropologists can learn from psychologists, and the other way around
The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English-speakers call 'the mind' may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem 'spiritual'. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parallel states of critical self-reflection around explanation and comparison: anthropology in the wake of…
God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy
on May 21 2020 (see record 2020-36018-001). In the article, the phrase Mixed Effects in the table title for Tables 1-3 and Tables 6-8 is incorrect. The corrected phrase should appear instead as Fixed Effects. All versions of this article have been corrected.] In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is c…
Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures
What anthropologists can learn from psychologists, and the other way around
The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English-speakers call 'the mind' may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem 'spiritual'. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parallel states of critical self-reflection around explanation and comparison: anthropology in the wake of…
God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy
on May 21 2020 (see record 2020-36018-001). In the article, the phrase Mixed Effects in the table title for Tables 1-3 and Tables 6-8 is incorrect. The corrected phrase should appear instead as Fixed Effects. All versions of this article have been corrected.] In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is c…
What anthropologists can learn from psychologists, and the other way around
The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English-speakers call 'the mind' may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem 'spiritual'. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parallel states of critical self-reflection around explanation and comparison: anthropology in the wake of…
Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths
Significance The sensory presence of gods and spirits is central to many of the religions that have shaped human history—in fact, many people of faith report having experienced such events. But these experiences are poorly understood by social scientists and rarely studied empirically. We present a multiple-discipline, multiple-methods program of research involving thousands of people from diverse cultures and religions which demonstrates that tw…
To Believe Is Not to Think: A Cross-Cultural Finding
Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completi…
The sense of presence: Lessons from virtual reality
The sense of presence—or the sense of “being there”—is a poorly understood phenomenon, especially in the case of “unseen others,” e.g., God. We used the tools of virtual reality (VR) to explore the effects of active imagination in creating a sense of presence of an ambiguously real other. We found that adding a visual representation was more effective than verbal language alone in evoking a sense of social presence in a ten-minute intervention, t…
Similarities and differences in concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures
Belief, culture, & development: Insights from studying the development of religious beliefs and behaviors
Beliefs About the Development of Mental Life
Caregiving relationships with infants and children are among the most common and most complex human social interactions. Adults’ perceptions of children’s mental capacities have important consequences for the well-being of children in their care—particularly in the first few years of life, when children’s communication skills are limited and caregivers must infer children’s rapidly developing thoughts, feelings, and needs. In a series of studies,…
Psychology (8 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Developmental psychology (3 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Art (2 works)