Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:57:02.894Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - The Science of Belief: A Progress Report

from Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches to Beliefs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

By
Nicolas Porot  and
Eric Mandelbaum
Edited by
Julien Musolino ,
Joseph Sommer  and
Pernille Hemmer
Julien Musolino
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Joseph Sommer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Pernille Hemmer
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo effect, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. This article provides the first detailing of the psychofunctionalist account of belief. The picture of belief that emerges is one where belief fixation is automatic and effortless, and independent of controlled and effortful belief rejection. Belief is then stored in fragmented networks of causally isolated, context-sensitive databases. Finally, beliefs can be changed by two distinct updating systems, with one hewing to more or less normatively appropriate methods of Bayesian updating, and the other relying on a psychological immune system, which functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Understanding belief’s role in our cognitive economy allows us to illuminate broader real-world issues such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world.

Keywords

belief acquisitionbelief storagebelief changetheory of mindSpinozan belief fixationfragmentationpsychological immune systemfake newsmisinformationmetaphysics of belief
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cognitive Science of Belief
A Multidisciplinary Approach
 , pp. 55 - 91
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Allport, F. H. & Lepkin, M. (1945) Wartime rumors of waste and special privilege: why some people believe them. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 40, 3–36.Google Scholar
Alter, A. L. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009) Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 219–235. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868309341564CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, C. A. (1983) Abstract and concrete data in the perseverance of social theories: when weak data lead to unshakeable beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19(2), 93–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(83)90031-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, K. (2012) Do apes read minds? Toward a new folk psychology. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, K. (2017) Do chimpanzees reason about belief? In Andrews, K., & Beck, J. (Eds.). The Routledge handbook of philosophy of animal minds (pp. 258–268). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315742250-25Google Scholar
Asp, E. & Tranel, D. (2013) False tagging theory. In Stuss, D. T., & Knight, R. T. (Eds.). Principles of frontal lobe function, 2nd ed. (pp. 383–416). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195134971.001.0001Google Scholar
Astuti, R. & Harris, P. (2008) Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science: a Multidisciplinary Journal, 32(4), 713–740. https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210802066907Google Scholar
Atran, S. (2002) In gods we trust. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bail, C. A., Argyle, L. P., Brown, T. W. et al. (2018) Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9216–9221.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baldassano, C., Chen, J., Zadbood, A., Pillow, J. W., Hasson, U., & Norman, K. A. (2017) Discovering event structure in continuous narrative perception and memory. Neuron, 95(3), 709–721.Google Scholar
Banas, J. A. & Rains, S. A. (2010) A meta-analysis of research on inoculation theory. Communication Monographs, 77(3), 281–311.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S. (1997) Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8Google Scholar
Beecher, Henry K. (1955) The powerful placebo. Journal of the American Medical Association 159(7), 1602–1606. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1955.02960340022006CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bendaña, J. & Mandelbaum, E. (2021) The fragmentation of belief. In Kindermann, Dirk, Borgoni, Cristina, & Onofri, Andrea (Eds.). The fragmentation of mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bermúdez, J. L. (2008) Thinking without words. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bingel, U., Wanigasekera, V., Wiech, K. et al. (2011) The effect of treatment expectation on drug efficacy: imaging the analgesic benefit of the opioid remifentanil. Science translational medicine, 3(70), 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3001244Google Scholar
Block, N. (1980) Troubles with functionalism. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, 1, 268–305.Google Scholar
Bouton, M. E. (2004) Context and behavioral processes in extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485–494. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.78804Google Scholar
Bouton, M. E, & Bolles, R.C. (1979) Role of conditioned contextual stimuli in reinstatement of extinguished fear. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 5(4), 368–378. https://doi.org/10.1037//0097-7403.5.4.368Google Scholar
Bouton, M. E. & King, D. A. (1983) Contextual control of the extinction of conditioned fear: tests for the associative value of the context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 9(3), 248–265.Google Scholar
Bouton, M. E. & Ricker, S. T. (1994) Renewal of extinguished responding in a second context. Animal Learning & Behavior, 22, 317–324.Google Scholar
Bouton, M. E., Westbrook, R. F., Corcoran, K. A., & Maren, S. (2006) Contextual and temporal modulation of extinction: behavioral and biological mechanisms. Biological Psychiatry, 60(4), 352–360.Google Scholar
Brock, T. C. & Balloun, J. L. (1967) Behavioral receptivity to dissonant information. Journal of personality and social psychology, 6(4), 413–428.Google Scholar
Brooks, D. C. & Bouton, M. E. (1993) A retrieval cue for extinction attenuates spontaneous recovery. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 19(1), 77–89.Google Scholar
Brownstein, M. (2015) Implicit Bias. In Zalta, E (Ed.). The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Spring 2015.Google Scholar
Brownstein, M. (2018) The implicit mind: cognitive architecture, the self, and ethics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190633721.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buttelmann, D., Buttelmann, F., Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2017) Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task. PLoS ONE, 12(4), 1–13, e0173793. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173793Google Scholar
Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009) Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition. 112(2), 337–342 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.05.006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brashier, N. M. & Marsh, E. J. (2020) Judging truth. Annual Review of Psychology, 71(1), 499–515. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-050807Google Scholar
Cheke, L. G. & Clayton, N. S. (2010) Mental time travel in animals. WIREs Cognitive Science, 1(6), 915–930. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.59Google Scholar
Cheyette, S. & Piantadosi, S. (2017) Knowledge transfer in a probabilistic language of thought. In CogSci.Google Scholar
Cialdini, R. B., Trost, M. R., & Newsom, J. T. (1995) Preference for consistency: the development of a valid measure and the discovery of surprising behavioral implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(2), 318–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.2.318CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clatterbuck, H. (2016) Darwin, Hume, Morgan, and the verae causae of psychology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 60, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2016.09.002Google Scholar
Clements, W. A. & Perner, J. (1994) Implicit understanding of belief. Cognitive Development, 9(4), 377–395. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0885-2014(94)90012-4Google Scholar
Colloca, L. & Benedetti, F. (2007) Nocebo hyperalgesia: how anxiety is turned into pain. Current Opinions in Anaesthesiology, 20(5), 435–439. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACO.0b013e3282b972fbGoogle Scholar
Compton, J. (2020) Prophylactic versus therapeutic inoculation treatments for resistance to influence. Communication Theory, 30(3), 330–343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cone, J., Flaharty, K., & Ferguson, M. J. (2021) The long-term effects of new evidence on implicit impressions of other people. Psychological Science, 32(2), 173–188. doi:10.1177/0956797620963559Google Scholar
Cone, J., Mann, T. C., & Ferguson, M. J. (2017). Changing our implicit minds: how, when, and why implicit evaluations can be rapidly revised. In Olson, J. M., (Ed.). Advances in experimental social psychology: vol. 56 (pp. 131–199). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Davidson, D. (1982) Rational animals. Dialectica, 36(4), 317–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.1982.tb01546.xGoogle Scholar
De Houwer, J., Van Dessel, P., & Moran, T. (2020) Attitudes beyond associations: On the role of propositional representations in stimulus evaluation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 127–183.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1987) The intentional stance. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1991) Real patterns. The Journal of Philosophy, 88(1), 27–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/2027085Google Scholar
DuBrow, S., Rouhani, N., Niv, Y., & Norman, K. A. (2017) Does mental context drift or shift?. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 17, 141–146.Google Scholar
Ecker, U. K., Lewandowsky, S., & Apai, J. (2011). Terrorists brought down the plane! – no, actually it was a technical fault: Processing corrections of emotive information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(2), 283–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ecker, U. K., Lewandowsky, S., & Tang, D. T. (2010) Explicit warnings reduce but do not eliminate the continued influence of misinformation. Memory & Cognition, 38(8), 1087–1100.Google Scholar
Egan, A. (2008) Seeing and believing: perception, belief formation and the divided mind. Philosophical Studies, 140(1), 47–63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098–008-9225-1Google Scholar
Elga, A. & Rayo, A. (2021) Fragmentation and Information Access. In Kindermann, Dirk, Borgoni, Cristina, & Onofri, Andrea (Eds.). The fragmentation of mind. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fazio, L., Rand, D., & Pennycook, G. (2019) Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1705–1710. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423–019-01651-4Google Scholar
Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N. M., Payne, B. K., & Marsh, E. J. (2015) Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098.suppGoogle Scholar
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/10030-000CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Festinger, L., Riecken, H., & Schachter, S. (2017) When prophecy fails: a social and psychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world. Lulu Press, Inc.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1978) Propositional attitudes. The Monist, 61(4), 501–523. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197861444CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1987) Psychosemantics: the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendler, T. (2008) Alief and belief. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20081051025Google Scholar
Gilbert, D. T. (1991) How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46(2), 107–119. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.46.2.107CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilbert, D. T., Krull, D., & Malone, M. (1990). Unbelieving the unbelievable: some problems in the rejection of false information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(4), 601–613. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.4.601Google Scholar
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998) Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.617Google Scholar
Greenwald, A. & Nosek, B. (2009) Attitudinal dissociation: what does it mean? In Attitudes: insights from the new implicit measures, Petty, R., Fazio, R., & Brinol, P. (Eds.). (pp. 65–82). Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Goodman, N. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Gerstenberg, T. (2014) Concepts in a probabilistic language of thought. In The conceptual mind: new directions in the study of concepts. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Goodman, N. D., Ullman, T. D., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2011). Learning a theory of causality. Psychological Review, 118(1), 110–199.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007) Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315(5812), 619–619. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1134475Google Scholar
Gu, X., Lohrenz, T., Salas, R. et al. (2015) Belief about nicotine selectively modulates value and reward prediction error signals in smokers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(8): 2539–2544. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1416639112Google Scholar
Gundersen, H., Specht, K., Grüner, R., Ersland, L., & Hugdahl, K. (2008) Separating the effects of alcohol and expectancy on brain activation: an fMRI working memory study. Neuroimage, 42(4), 1587–1596. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.05.037Google Scholar
Hampton, J. A. (1995) Testing the prototype theory of concepts. Journal of Memory and Language, 34(5), 686–708. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1995.1031Google Scholar
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977) Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behaviour, 16(1), 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022–5371(77)80012-1.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, J., Rothschild, D., & Spectre, L. (2016) Belief is weak. Philosophical Studies, 173(5), 1393–1404. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098–015-0553-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Holst, R. J., Clark, L., Veltman, D. J., van den Brink, W., & Goudriaan, A. E. (2014) Enhanced striatal responses during expectancy coding in alcohol dependence. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 142, 204–208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2014.06.019Google Scholar
Howard, S., Avarguès-Weber, A., Garcia, J., Greentree, A.D., & Dyer, A. D. (2019) Numerical ordering of zero in honeybees. Science, 360(6393), 1124–1126. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar4975Google Scholar
Hughes, S., Ye, Y., Van Dessel, P., & De Houwer, J. (2019) When people co-occur with good or bad events: graded effects of relational qualifiers on evaluative conditioning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(2), 196–208. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218781340CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Icard, T. (2016) Subjective probability as sampling propensity. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7(4), 863–903.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, K. W. & Nordan, F. M. (1979) Classification of placebo drugs: effect of color. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 49(2), 367–372. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1979.49.2.367Google Scholar
Jensen, G., Alkan, Y., Ferrera, V. P., & Terrace, H. S. (2018) Reward associations do not explain transitive inference performance in monkeys. Science Advances, 5(7), Article aaw2089. https://doi.org:10.7287/peerj.preprints.26889v1Google Scholar
Katz, Y., Goodman, N.D., Kersting, K., Kemp, C., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2008). Modeling semantic cognition as logical dimensionality reduction. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, 30.Google Scholar
Kemp, C., Goodman, N., & Tenenbaum, J. (2008). Learning and using relational theories. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 20, 753–760.Google Scholar
Knowles, E. S. & Condon, C. A. (1999) Why people say “yes”: a dual-process theory of acquiescence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(2), 379–386. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.2.379Google Scholar
Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016) Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354(6308), 110–114. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf8110Google Scholar
Kufahl, P., Li, Z., Risinger, R. et al. (2008) Expectation modulates human brain responses to acute cocaine: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Biological Psychiatry, 63(2), 222–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2007.03.021Google Scholar
Kumkale, G. T. & Albarracín, D. (2004) The sleeper effect in persuasion: a meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 130(1), 143–172. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.1.143CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kurdi, B. & Banaji, M. R. (2017) Repeated evaluative pairings and evaluative statements: how effectively do they shift implicit attitudes? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(2), 194–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000239Google Scholar
Kurdi, B. & Banaji, M. R. (2019) Attitude change via repeated evaluative pairings versus evaluative statements: shared and unique features. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(5), 681–703. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000151Google Scholar
Kurdi, B. & Dunham, Y. (2020) Propositional accounts of implicit evaluation: taking stock and looking ahead. Social Cognition, 38(Supplement), s42–s67. http://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2020.38.supp.s42Google Scholar
Kurdi, B. & Dunham, Y. (2021) Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences. Cognition, 214, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104792.Google Scholar
Lai, C. K., Skinner, A. L., Cooley, E. et al. (2016) Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(8), 1001–1016. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/xge0000179Google Scholar
Lacassagne, D., Béna, J., & Corneille, O. (2022) Is Earth a perfect square? Repetition increases the perceived truth of highly implausible statements. Cognition, 223, 105052. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105052Google Scholar
Lange, M. (2002) Who’s afraid of Ceteris-Paribus laws? Or: how i Learned to stop worrying and love them. Erkenntnis 57, 407–423. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021546731582CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, D. (1980) Mad pain and Martian pain. In Block, Ned (Ed.). Readings in the philosophy of psychology (pp. 216 S.222). Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Liang, P., Jordan, M. I., & Klein, D. (2010) Learning programs: a hierarchical Bayesian approach. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-10) (pp. 639–646).Google Scholar
Lurz, R. W. (2015) Mindreading animals: the debate over what animals know about other minds. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262016056.001.0001Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2013) Against alief. Philosophical Studies, 165(1), 197–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098–012-9930-7Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2014) Thinking is believing. Inquiry, 57(1), 55–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2014.858417Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2015a) Associationist theories of thought. In Zalta, Edward N. (Ed.). The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/associationist-thought/Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2015b) The automatic and the ballistic: modularity beyond perceptual processes. Philosophical Psychology, 28(8), 1147–1156. www.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2014.950217CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2016) Attitude, inference, association: on the propositional structure of implicit bias. Noûs, 50(3), 629–658. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12089Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2018) Seeing and conceptualizing: modularity and the shallow contents of perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 97(2), 267–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12368Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (2019) Troubles with Bayesianism: an introduction to the psychological immune system. Mind & Language, 34(2), 141–157. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12205Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. (Forthcoming) A psychofunctional theory of belief. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mandelbaum, E. & Quilty-Dunn, J. (2015). Believing without reason or: why liberals shouldn’t watch Fox News. The Harvard Review of Philosophy, 22, 42–52. https://doi.org/10.5840/harvardreview2015226Google Scholar
Mann, T. C. & Ferguson, M. J. (2015) Can we undo our first impressions? The role of reinterpretation in reversing implicit evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 823–849. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000021Google Scholar
Mann, T. C. & Ferguson, M. J. (2017). Reversing implicit first impressions through reinterpretation after a two-day delay. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68, 122–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.06.004Google Scholar
Mann, T. C., Kurdi, B., & Banaji, M. R. (2019) How effectively can implicit evaluations be updated? Using evaluative statements after aversive repeated evaluative pairings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance Online Publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000701.Google Scholar
McHoskey, J. W. (1995) Case closed? On the John F. Kennedy assassination: biased assimilation of evidence and attitude polarization. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 17(3), 395–409. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15324834basp1703_7Google Scholar
McGuire, W. J. (1964). Inducing resistance to persuasion: some contemporary approaches. In Berkowitz, L (Ed.). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 1 (pp. 191–229). Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mercier, H. (2020) Not born yesterday: the science of who we trust and what we believe. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mollica, F. & Piantadosi, S. (2015). Towards semantically rich and recursive word learning models. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Conference, 37, 1607–1612.Google Scholar
Nichols, S. (2021) Rational rules: towards a theory of moral learning. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nielsen, M. & Stewart, R. T. (2020) Persistent disagreement and polarization in a Bayesian setting. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72 (1), 51–78.Google Scholar
Núñez, R., Allen, M., Gao, R., Rigoli, C. M., Relaford-Doyle, J., & Semenuks, A. (2019) What happened to cognitive science?. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(8), 782–791. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562–019-0626-2CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Onishi, K. H. & Baillargeon, R. (2005) Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308(5719), 255–258. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1107621Google Scholar
van Orman Quine, W. & Ullian, J. (1978) The web of belief. Random House.Google Scholar
Ossipov, M. H., Dussor, G. O., & Porreca, F. (2010) Central modulation of pain. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 120(11), 3779–3787. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI43766Google Scholar
Pennycook, G., Cannon, Tyrone D. & Rand, , David, G. (2018) Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(12), 1865–1880. www.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000465Google Scholar
Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Barr, N., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2015) On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549–563.Google Scholar
Pennycook, G., Epstein, Z., Mosleh, M., Arechar, A. A., Eckles, D., & Rand, D. G. (2021) Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature, 592, 1–6.Google Scholar
Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G. (2019) Lazy, not biased: susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.011Google Scholar
Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G. (2021) The Psychology of Fake News. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(5), 388–402.Google Scholar
Pepperberg, I. M., Gray, S. L., Mody, S., Cornero, F. M., & Carey, S. (2019) Logical reasoning by a grey parrot? A case study of the disjunctive syllogism. Behaviour, 156(5–8), 409–445. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568539x-00003528Google Scholar
Petrocelli, J. V., Tormala, Z. L., & Rucker, D. D. (2007) Unpacking attitude certainty: attitude clarity and attitude correctness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.30Google Scholar
Phillips, J., Buckwalter, W., Cushman, F. et al. (2020) Knowledge before belief. Behavioral and Brain Science, 8(44), E140. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20000618Google Scholar
Piantadosi, S. T., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Goodman, N. D. (2012) Bootstrapping in a language of thought: a formal model of numerical concept learning. Cognition 123(2), 199–217.Google Scholar
Piantadosi, S. T., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Goodman, N. D. (2016) The logical primitives of thought: Empirical foundations for compositional cognitive models. Psychological Review, 123(4), 392–424. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039980Google Scholar
Porot, N. J. (2019) Some non-human languages of thought. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). City University of New York, Graduate Center.Google Scholar
Povinelli, D. J. & Vonk, J. (2003) Chimpanzee minds: suspiciously human? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(4), 157–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00053-6Google Scholar
Quilty-Dunn, J. & Mandelbaum, E. (2018a) Against dispositionalism: belief in cognitive science. Philosophical Studies, 175(9), 2353–2372. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098–017-0962-xGoogle Scholar
Quilty-Dunn, J. & Mandelbaum, E. (2018b) Inferential transitions. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96(3), 532–547. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2017.1358754Google Scholar
Rescorla, M. (2016) Bayesian sensorimotor psychology. Mind & Language, 31(1), 3–36.Google Scholar
Ritchie, K. (2016) Can semantics guide ontology? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94(1), 24–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2015.1045912Google Scholar
Rosati, A. G. & Santos, L. R. (2016) Spontaneous metacognition in rhesus monkeys. Psychological Science, 27(9), 1181–1191. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616653737CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ross, L. (1977) The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065–2601(08)60357-3Google Scholar
Schachter, S. & Singer, J. E. (1962) Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69(5), 379–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046234Google Scholar
Schwitzgebel, E. (2013) A dispositional approach to attitudes: thinking outside of the belief box. In Nottelmann, N. (Ed.). New essays on belief (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026521_5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seifert, C. (2002) The continued influence of misinformation in memory: what makes a correction effective? In Ross, B. (Ed.). Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 41 (pp. 265–292). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Singer, D. J., Bramson, A., Grim, P. et al. (2019) Rational social and political polarization. Philosophical Studies, 176(9), 2243–2267.Google Scholar
Skurnik, I., Yoon, C., Park, D. C., & Schwarz, N. (2005) How warnings about false claims become recommendations. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4), 713–724.Google Scholar
Smith, J. D., Couchman, J. J., & Beran, M. J. (2014). The highs and lows of theoretical interpretation in animal-metacognition research. The Cognitive Neuroscience of Metacognition, 367(1594), 1297–1309. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45190-4_5Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1997) Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind and Language, 12(1), 67–83.Google Scholar
Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C. et al. (2010) Epistemic vigilance. Mind and Language, 25 (4), 359–393.Google Scholar
Stich, S. P. (1979) Do animals have beliefs? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 57(1), 15–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048407912341011Google Scholar
Storms, M. D. & Nisbett, R. E. (1970). Insomnia and the attribution process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16(2), 319–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0029835Google Scholar
Tibbetts, E., Agudelo, J., Pandit, S., & Riojas, J. (2019) Transitive inference in Polistes paper wasps. Biology Letters, 15(5), Article 20190015. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0015Google Scholar
Tracey, I. (2010) Getting the pain you expect: mechanisms of placebo, nocebo and reappraisal effects in humans. Nature Medicine, 16(11), 1277–1283. https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.2229Google Scholar
Tracy, R. Young, S. Porot, N., & Mandelbaum, E. (under review) Disfluency Attenuates the Reception of Pseudoprofound and Postmodernist Bullshit.Google Scholar
Trouche, E., Johansson, P., Hall, L., & Mercier, H. (2016) The selective laziness of reasoning. Cognitive Science 40(8), 2122–2136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Unkelbach, C. & Rom, S. C. (2017) A referential theory of the repetition-induced truth effect. Cognition, 160, 110–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.016Google Scholar
Van Dessel, P., De Houwer, J., Gast, A., Smith, C. T., & De Schryver, M. (2016) Instructing implicit processes: when instructions to approach or avoid influence implicit but not explicit evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 63, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.11.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Dessel, P., Ye, Y., & De Houwer, J. (2019) Changing deep-rooted implicit evaluation in the blink of an eye: negative verbal information shifts automatic liking of Gandhi. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(2), 266–273. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617752064Google Scholar
Van Leeuwen, N. (2014) Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition, 133(3), 698–715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.015Google Scholar
Van Leeuwen, N. (2017) Two paradigms for religious representation: the physicist and the playground (a reply to Levy). Cognition, 164, 206–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.03.021Google Scholar
Vogel, T., Silva, R. R., Thomas, A., & Wänke, M. (2020) Truth is in the mind, but beauty is in the eye: fluency effects are moderated by a match between fluency source and judgment dimension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(8), 1587–1596. doi:10.1037/xge0000731Google Scholar
Vul, E., Goodman, N., Griffiths, T. L., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2014). One and done? Optimal decisions from very few samples. Cognitive Science, 38(4), 599–637. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12101Google Scholar
Vul, E. & Pashler, H. (2008) Measuring the crowd within: probabilistic representations within individuals. Psychological Science, 19(7), 645–647. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02136.xGoogle Scholar
Waber, R. L., Shiv, B., Carmon, Z., & Ariely, D. (2008) Commercial features of placebo and therapeutic. Journal of the American Medical Association, 299(9), 1016–1017. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.299.9.1016Google Scholar
Watson, A., Power, A., Brown, C., El-Deredy, W., & Jones, A. (2012) Placebo analgesia: cognitive influences on therapeutic outcome. Arthritis Research & Therapy, 14, Article 206. https://doi.org/10.1186/ar3783.Google Scholar
Weisberg, J. (2020) Belief in psyontology. Philosophers’ Imprint, 20(11), 1–27.Google Scholar
Webster, D. M. & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994) Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.67.6.1049Google Scholar
Wegner, D. M., Coulton, G. F., & Wenzlaff, R. (1985) The transparency of denial: briefing in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(2), 338–346.Google Scholar
Whissel, C., Abramson, C. I., & Barber, K. I. (2013) The search for cognitive terminology: an analysis of comparative psychology journal titles. Behavioral Sciences, 3(1), 133–142.Google Scholar
Wiklund, R. A. & Rosenbaum, S. H. (1997) Anesthesiology (part one of two). New England Journal of Medicine, 337(17), 1215–1219. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm199710233371707Google Scholar
Zanna, M. & Cooper, J. (1974) Dissonance and the pill: an attribution approach to studying the arousal properties of dissonance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(5), 703–709. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036651Google Scholar
Zettlemoyer, L. S. & Collins, M. (2005) Learning to map sentences to logical form: Structured classification with probabilistic categorical grammars. Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 658–666.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×