PSYCHOLOGY & RELIGION SERIES
Presented by Dr. Tania Lombrozo
Professor of Psychology; Associate of the Department of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Value, Princeton University
People believe all sorts of things, from the mundane (“Today is Thursday”) to the scientific (“The universe began with the Big Bang”) to the sacred (“Life has purpose” or “There is a God”).
What are these beliefs like? Are scientific beliefs fundamentally different from religious beliefs?
Cognitive scientists tackle these questions with the tools of philosophy and the natural and social sciences. In this talk, Dr. Lombrozo will present work from her lab investigating the psychology of scientific and religious belief, focusing on whether such beliefs are held to different evidential standards and differentiated in people’s minds. Some of this evidence will come from research on existential explanations: people's answers to questions like “How did the universe come to exist?” or “What happens after we die?”, that often prompt both scientific and religious responses. Some of this evidence will come from people’s judgments of their own and others' beliefs.
Join us to explore how we differentiate beliefs that play mostly “epistemic” (or evidence-based) roles from beliefs that play important social, emotional, and personal roles. And, how do religious beliefs factor in to the whole picture?
Register to receive the Zoom link. Barring technical issues, this talk will be posted on our Program Recording Archives.
Thank you to our generous program sponsors for helping bring this program to our community:
Rabbi George and Sue Driesen, and Lew and Susan Winarsky
Tania Lombrozo is a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and an Associate of the Department of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values. She directs the Program in Cognitive Science and co-directs Natural and Artificial Minds (NAM), a new research initiative at the intersection of cognitive science and AI. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University.
Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, conceptual representation, categorization, social cognition, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology.
She is the recipient of numerous early-career awards including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She lives in Princeton, NJ with her husband and two daughters and is currently writing a book on the psychology of explanation.
We extend a special thank you to Andrew R. Ammerman for sponsoring our Fall 2024 program lineup. He dedicates the semester’s learning in loving memory of Josephine and H. Max Ammerman and Stephen C.