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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 the 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).

The visual algorithm of bounded reflection.
Figure 1. The Bounded Reflectivist Model of Reflective Reasoning (Byrd 2022).

With students and scientists around the work, we aim 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, in prep.), philosophical psychology (Byrd & Conway, 2019; Byrd, 2023), and technology (Byrd, 2020, 2021), and their intersections (Byrd, under review). Our methods and results can benefit 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. Our rare combinations of skills and resources has shortened the process to hours.

Why does this matter? First, process tracing can provide far more information about the otherwise unobserved processes that scientists speculate about based solely upon the output of these processes. This insight into the black box of behavior can radically improve reproducibility and implementation. Second, making process tracing easier democratizes cognitive science by making higher quality 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.
  1. We clarify what does and does not help people think more reflectively.

We are revealing that classic nudges or tweaks do not reliably get people to think more reflectively (e.g., Byrd 2024; Cullen, Byrd, Sharma, et al.), but that more natural and promising protocols like thought experiments (Byrd 2024) and Socratic dialogue (Cullen, Byrd, Chapkovski et al.). This insight may save resources and even lives when implemented in business, finance, healthcare, intelligence analysis, policymaking, etc.

  • 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
  • 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.
  1. We gained understanding of reflective thinking in philosophical psychology.

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 clarified 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. Forthcoming. 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, 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, 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.

  1. We find opportunities to better communicate the science of implicit bias.

We continue to refine debates about implicit bias. For example, we clarify why we cannot yet conclude that implicit association tests measure something unconscious or unintentional (Byrd 2019) and how cognitive scientists 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