Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy, and is the foundation of descriptive ethics.
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional errors is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. It refers to the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, often leading to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments, or illogical interpretations of events and behaviors.
Trait ascription bias is the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable in their personal traits across different situations. More specifically, it is a tendency to describe one's own behaviour in terms of situational factors while preferring to describe another's behaviour by ascribing fixed dispositions to their personality. This may occur because peoples' own internal states are more readily observable and available to them than those of others.
Eleanor Rosch is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology.
Keith James Holyoak is a Canadian–American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed how analogy can be used to enhance learning of new abstract concepts by both children and adults, as well as how reasoning breaks down in cases of brain damage.
Within computer technology, the gaze-contingency paradigm is a general term for techniques allowing a computer screen display to change in function depending on where the viewer is looking. Gaze-contingent techniques are part of the eye movement field of study in psychology.
Dysrationalia is defined as the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence. It is a concept in educational psychology and is not a clinical disorder such as a thought disorder. Dysrationalia can be a resource to help explain why smart people fall for Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent encounters.
In psychology, the human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and effortful ways, regardless of intelligence. Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending cognitive effort. The cognitive miser theory is an umbrella theory of cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attributional biases to explain when and why people are cognitive misers.
The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It overlaps with psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.
Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one. The first known protoscientific study of cause and effect occurred in Aristotle's Physics. Causal inference is an example of causal reasoning.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Renée Baillargeon is a Canadian American research psychologist. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.
The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behaviour.
Intuitive statistics, or folk statistics, is the cognitive phenomenon where organisms use data to make generalizations and predictions about the world. This can be a small amount of sample data or training instances, which in turn contribute to inductive inferences about either population-level properties, future data, or both. Inferences can involve revising hypotheses, or beliefs, in light of probabilistic data that inform and motivate future predictions. The informal tendency for cognitive animals to intuitively generate statistical inferences, when formalized with certain axioms of probability theory, constitutes statistics as an academic discipline.
Susan J. Lederman is a Canadian experimental psychologist. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is recognized for her contributions to the field of haptics.
Barbara Anne ("Bobbie") Spellman is a professor of law and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Trained first as a lawyer, then as a cognitive psychologist, her work spans the two fields. As an academic psychologist, Spellman's research was in memory and higher order cognition. She also was involved early in the Open Science movement, mostly in her role as editor in chief of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science from 2010 to 2015. As a legal academic, her work includes co-authoring "The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law" with Michael J. Saks. She currently advocates for psychological science, and for science generally, as a fellow and member of the steering group of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has over 7,500 citations.
Hillel J. Einhorn was an American psychologist who played a key role in the development of the field of behavioral decision theory. Einhorn earned BA and MA degrees at Brooklyn College, married Susan Michaels in 1966, and received his PhD in psychology from Wayne State University in 1969 under the supervision of Alan Bass. In 1969, Einhorn joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He was promoted to professor in 1976 and appointed to the Wallace W. Booth professorship in 1986. In addition to his research contributions, Einhorn restructured the behavioral science curriculum by providing a specific focus on behavioral decision theory, and founded the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago in 1977. Einhorn died of Hodgkin's disease on January 8, 1987, at the age of 45.
The proportionality bias, also known as major event/major cause heuristic, is the tendency to assume that big events have big causes. It is a type of cognitive bias and plays an important role in people's tendency to accept conspiracy theories. Academic psychologist Rob Brotherton summarises it as “When something big happens, we tend to assume that something big must have caused it”.
Tania Lombrozo is an American psychologist who is the Arthur W. Marks Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She oversees the Concepts and Cognition Laboratory, which looks to understand the science that underpins cognition.
