RuCCS HIVE MIND SERIES
Abstract: In January, the World Economic Forum issued a report ranking misinformation and disinformation as the number 1 threat to democracy. The "post-truth" era of politics and AI-generated misinformation may be dividing people into different subjective realities. On the other hand, the World Economic Forum has been accused of engineering the COVID-19 pandemic to seize control of the global economy and depopulate the planet.
How do people arrive at such different beliefs? This question is related to several ongoing debates, including whether beliefs aim at truth or serve other needs like enhancing self-esteem; whether the purpose of reasoning is to arrive at truth or to come up with arguments supporting ones ingroup; and whether humans are rational or irrational.
Beyond these popular issues, there are many arguments in cognitive science about the nature of belief: What does it mean to believe something? Do beliefs drive behavior? Are there different types of beliefs? Are beliefs even real?
Join us for a Hive Mind discussion of belief!
Bio:
Joseph received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University. He is interested in the bounded rationality of cognition under computational constraints and a broad intersection of fields relevant to belief including the philosophy of mental representation, epistemology, and the psychology of persuasion, reasoning, and judgment and decision making. His current work aims at understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying belief, including how beliefs are updated (or not) in response to evidence.
Hive Mind is a new working group for the RuCCS community. The goal of the group is to offer a space for casual conversations and collaborative thinking about work-in-progress, new research directions, or topics we want to learn more about.