psychology
TagPhilosophy of Psychiatry: a Journal’s 30th Anniversary & Recent Developments in the Field
How has philosophy of psychiatry developed over the past few decades, and what questions and subjects currently captivate researchers in this interdisciplinary area? (more…)
$3.4 Million Grant for Project on Humility in Inquiry
Philosopher Nathan Ballantyne (Arizona State University) and psychologist Norbert Schwarz (University of Southern California) have won a $3.4 million grant for their project, “Humility in Inquiry”. (more…)
Philosopher-Led Project Studies Self-Control & Poverty in the Global South
A project is underway to study self-control in contexts of poverty in the Global South, directed by professor of philosophy Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Universidad Externado de Colombia & Imperial College London). (more…)
Progress at Philosophical Psychology (guest post)
Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham), who took over the editorship of Philosophical Psychology following a publication controversy in 2020, and who announced some changes to the journal last year, writes in with an update about their implementation and results. (more…)
Implicit Attitudes, Science, and Philosophy (guest post)
“Philosophers, including myself, have for decades been too credulous about science, being misled by scientists’ marketing and ignoring the unavoidable uncertainties that affect the scientific process…” (more…)
Dunning-Kruger Discussion
A post by Blair Fix at Economics from the Top Down about whether the Dunning-Kruger effect (the inverse relationship between one’s skills in a particular domain and one’s tendency to overestimate them) is a mere statistical artifact, that I put in the Heap of Links last week, generated some discussion and prompted an email from a philosopher with a possibly helpful ..
“The Way Philosophy Is Personal”
Wittgenstein’s early private notebooks have just been published in English, translated by Marjorie Perloff (Stanford). Towards the end of an essay about them, Kieran Setiya (MIT) draws attention to “the way philosophy is personal.” (more…)
Deontologists, Utilitarians, and Predictability
Non-philosophers tend to view utilitarians as less moral and deontologists as more moral. The reason for this, according to recent research, is that deontologists are more “predictable.” (more…)
Philosopher Awarded Nearly $1 Million Grant for Memory and Forgiveness Project
Felipe De Brigard, associate professor of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke University, and leader of the Imagination and Modal Cognition Lab there, has been awarded a grant of $988,602 for his project, “Forgetting and Forgiving: Exploring the Connections between Memory and Forgiveness.” (more…)
What Predicts Professional Philosophers’ Views? (updated)
A new study looks at correlations between professional philosophers’ philosophical views and their psychological traits, religious beliefs, political views, demographic information, and other characteristics. (more…)
A Philosopher Takes on Evolutionary Psychology
“Evolutionary psychological inferences commonly fail to satisfy reasonable epistemic criteria.” The failures are so significant that good evolutionary psychology may not be possible. (more…)
Is X-Phi P-Hacked? (guest post by Mike Stuart, Edouard Machery and David Colaço)
Has experimental philosophy (“X-Phi”) exhibited signs of “p-hacking”? In this guest post*, Mike Stuart (Geneva), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh), and David Colaço (Mississippi) report their findings. (more…)
Moral Philosophy Courses Can Change Students’ Behavior
The share of meal plan expenditures on meat by students who took part in a philosophy class on the ethics of eating animals declined from 52% to 45%, with “no evidence that meat-eating rates went back up during the two months data was monitored,” according to a recent study whose authors believe it provides evidence for the claim that “ethics classes can influence s..
New Journal: Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
A new academic journal, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (PhiMiSci) will focus on “the interface between philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.” (more…)
A New Kind of Critical Thinking Text (guest post by David Manley)
“What would it look like if we taught only the most useful skills from the toolkits of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics?” (more…)
Study on the Personality and Reasoning of Philosophers
A new study is underway to learn about the relationship between personality and reasoning among philosophers. (more…)
Lessons on Disagreement from a Psychologist of Human Error
Lee Ross (Stanford), an influential social psychologist, reflects on his career of studying error and disagreement in a new essay at Perspectives on Psychological Science. (more…)
Experimental Philosophy and the Replication Crisis
The replication crisis in psychology and other fields, in which researchers have found it difficult or impossible to replicate the results of many earlier experiments (see the Reproducibility Project) is now being addressed by those working in experimental philosophy (x-phi), a subfield of philosophy that borrows surveying and experimental methods from psychology, w..
Philosophical Implications of New Thought-Imaging Technology
The CBC reports on recent work on thought-imaging technology, the use and development of which would raise various questions in ethics, and which would possibly be relevant to work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of science, philosophy of action, and other areas of philosophy. (more…)
Helpful Remarks Regarding Implicit Bias
Some common criticisms of implicit bias are mistaken, argue John Doris (Washington Univ., St. Louis), Laura Niemi (Duke), and Keith Payne (UNC Chapel Hill) in a recent column at Scientific American. (more…)
Mental Health and Philosophy of Mind
A philosopher has recently collaborated with a mental health organization to deliver a series of philosophy of mind workshops for people with an interest in mental health (including those with lived experience, mental health advocates, and service providers). (more…)
A Remembrance of Jerry Fodor, 1935-2017 (guest post by Georges Rey)
The following is an obituary for philosopher Jerry Fodor, who died earlier this week, by Georges Rey, professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland. (more…)
Personality Traits and Book Genre Preferences
What do people’s tastes in books tell us about their personalities? More specifically, what can we learn about people’s personalities from their preference for philosophy books? A team of researchers from Disney Research and the Singapore Ministry of Defense (what a combination!) used self-reported personality data from Facebook and user-supplied book-genre tags fro..
AAUP Writes To Sierra Nevada Re: Fired Professors
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has written a letter to Alan Walker, President of Sierra Nevada College, regarding the recent termination of Samantha Bankston, an associate professor of humanities who taught philosophy and other subjects at the school, and Dan Aalbers, a psychology instructor there. (more…)
Psychologists Test Kant’s Aesthetics
The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processi..
Reconsidering Implicit Bias
At the time of this post, bibliographic philosophy database PhilPapers has 1,975,719 entries. Of these, only 74 works seem to be about “implicit bias”—subconscious bias concerning, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexuality. One might think, then, that the idea of implicit bias hasn’t been of much importance in philosophy. Yet, while there is n..
New Media in Psychology and Philosophy
The focus here at Daily Nous is on the philosophy profession, but the following dispute down the street caught my attention. (more…)
Intelligence and the Cultures of Philosophy and Psychology
Josh Knobe holds appointments in Yale’s Department of Philosophy and its Cognitive Science program. He has an office in the Psychology Department there and he works with both philosophy and psychology students. In a recent interview, he remarks on the cultural differences between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology:
It has been fascinating to experience ..