Some questions have intuitive answers. For example, if a highly accurate test indicates that you are positive for a health condition, are you probably positive? Your first impulse might be “Of course!” But you may step back and reflect on that intuition: “How rare is this condition?” This reflection can either change or confirm their initial impulse. “Upon reflection, the condition is rare. So my test result is probably a false positive, despite the test’s accuracy.” This notion of reflection is rife in cognitive science (Byrd 2021) and in everyday decisions (Byrd 2022, Figure 1 below).
With students and scientists around the world, we develop methods to test how reflection can improve decisions and well-being. Topics include debiasing (e.g., Byrd, 2019, 2022), health (Byrd & Białek, 2021; Camacho & Byrd, in prep.; Parlow and Byrd, 2025), philosophical psychology (Byrd & Conway, 2019; Byrd, 2023), and technology (Byrd, 2020, 2021), and their intersections (Byrd, under review). Our results have been actionable for business, education, intelligence, medicine, and more.
1. We scale up and democratize methods for improving decision sciences.
Years ago, it took months to schedule, record, transcribe, and annotate every research participant’s thoughts. By bringing together skills and resources from various disciplines, we have shortened the process to hours.
Why does this matter? First, process tracing can provide far more information about the otherwise unobserved processes that scientists typically only speculate about (based on outputs as informationally sparse as button presses). This insight into the black box of behavior can radically improve reproducibility and implementation. Second, by streamlining process tracing we remove barriers by making higher quality cognitive science more accessible to less resourced scientists.
- Byrd N, Joseph B, Gongora G, Sirota M. Tell Us What You Really Think: A Think Aloud Protocol Analysis of the Verbal Cognitive Reflection Test. Journal of Intelligence. 2023. PMID: 37103261.
- Byrd N, Chapkovski P, Michalska K (draft). Experiments In Reflective Equilibrium With The Socrates Platform. researchgate.net/publication/370132037
- Chapkovski P.; Byrd N. (In preparation). Dual Processes and Dual Purposes: Overcoming Faulty Intuitions By Annotating Socratic Dialogue Transcripts.
2. We show what does and does not help people think more reflectively.
We are finding that relatively new nudges and tricks do not reliably help people think more reflectively (e.g., Byrd 2024; Cullen, Byrd, Sharma, et al.). We find better results from age-old practices like thought experiments (Byrd 2024) and Socratic dialogue (Cullen, Byrd, Chapkovski et al.). Fortunately, such reflective practices are easy to implement. So this insight may have positive implications for business, finance, healthcare, intelligence analysis, policymaking, and beyond.
- Byrd N. Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations: Aggregating and comparing results from mTurk, CloudResearch, Prolific, and undergraduate samples. Analysis. Forthcoming. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/y8sdm
- Byrd N. “[Does Argument Mapping Improve Reasoning Beyond Other Factors?]”. In preparation.
- Cullen S, Byrd N, Sharma V, Thomason N, & Oppenheimer, DM. Map My Words: Closing Partisan Gaps In Policy Evaluation With Argument Maps. In preparation.
- Cullen S, Byrd N, Chapkovski P, and Thomason, N. Thinking Alone, and Together: Dissenting Pairs Corrected More Faulty Decisions Than Solitary Reasoners. Draft.
3. We clarify the role of reflective thinking in improving rationality and well-being.
Cognitive scientists have staked entire theories about careful, reflective reasoning on small, unrepresentative samples of people who may have paid little attention to the researchers’ materials or who used unexpected resources (like browser scripts, survey farms, or even bots). By prioritizing larger, more diverse, and attentive samples, we are clarifying previously mixed results about reflective thinking in ethics, health, religion, and more.
- Byrd N, Stich S, Sytsma J. Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures. Religious Studies. 2025. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/qrz9g
- Byrd N. Great Minds do not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 2023. DOI: 10.1007/s13164-022-00628-y
- Byrd, N. Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity. Metaphilosophy, 53(1), 53–69. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12534
- Byrd N, Białek M. Your health vs. my liberty: Philosophical beliefs dominated reflection and identifiable victim effects when predicting public health recommendation compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cognition. 2021. PMID: 33756152.
- Byrd, N. Causal Network Accounts of Ill-Being: Depression & Digital Well-Being. In C. Burr & L. Floridi (Eds.), Ethics of Digital Well-Being: A Multidisciplinary Approach (pp. 221–245). 2020. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50585-1_11
Byrd N, Conway P. Not all who ponder count costs: Arithmetic reflection predicts utilitarian tendencies, but logical reflection predicts both deontological and utilitarian tendencies. Cognition. 2019. PMID: 31301587.
4. We reveal opportunities to better communicate the science of bias.
We continue to refine debates about implicit bias. For example, we show how we cannot yet conclude that implicit association tests measure something unconscious or unintentional (Byrd 2019) and how science communicators often talk past one another or mislead the public (Byrd and Thompson 2022).
- Byrd N, Thompson M. Testing for implicit bias: Values, psychometrics, and science communication. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Cognitive Science. 2022 Sep;13(5):e1612. PMID: 35671040.
- Byrd N. What we can (and can’t) infer about implicit bias from debiasing experiments. Synthese. 2019 February 12; 198:1427-1455. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-019-02128-6