Your experimental papers appear in broad cross-disciplinary journals such as Science and Nature while also populating leading journals in psychology and cognitive science. You jump across disciplines with a scholarly grace and precision akin to a champion figure skater – performing intellectual quadruple lutzes over psychology, philosophy, economics, and even theology. Yet you also have shown that even infants have senses of good and evil and how such early intuitions shape our later views of punishment, hypocrisy, and fairness.
You have discovered developmental origins of religious beliefs, explaining why so many of us come to embrace creationism, dualism, essentialism, and karma, and why we are so prone to blame the victim. You have unraveled many mysteries of social reasoning and its origins. In over one hundred scientific papers and six books, you have explored a dizzying array of topics, showing repeatedly how our lives are forever shaped by the cognitive follies of youth. The mind has provided an amply fertile playground for you and your students.Īfter demonstrating for the first time how young children’s views of others’ minds are essential to much of language development, you explored how we come to understand moral and social phenomena. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faculty member at Yale since 1999: Your research on how adults and children understand their social and moral worlds has transformed our views of the earliest origins of those understandings and how those origins continue to shape experiences throughout our lives.
Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Professor of Cognitive Science
0 kommentar(er)
