Cognitive Science | Nick Byrd, Ph.D.

Upon Reflection, Ep. 14: Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures

You may have heard that atheists tend to score better on reflection tests than theists? But why do scientists find this “analytic atheism” correlation?

Many studies have attempted to answer this question. Of course, even the best studies had limitations. So Steve Stich, Justin Sytsma, and I developed better methods and studied over 70,000 people on 6 continents. What did we find?

Apostasy was key. Those who shed their religion since childhood were the most reflective. Lifelong atheists were not necessarily more reflective than theists. In other words, the analytic atheism correlation seems to be explained by analytic apostasy.

In this episode, I’ll explain the methods, results, and implications in our paper “Analytic Atheism & Analytic Apostasy Across Cultures” which will be published in Religious Studies.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:02 — 67.4MB)

Upon Reflection, Ep. 13: Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples

Suppose you glance at a clock that, unbeknownst to you, is broken, showing the same time all day. Nonetheless, you happened to look at the clock precisely when it showed the correct time. So your belief about the time is correct. My question is this: did you know what time it is?

Perhaps you think that you did. After all, you formed a belief on the basis of a device that most people trust and the belief was true! What else would it mean to know something? Well, in academic philosophy, the orthodox answer to this kind of thought experiment is “no”.

People who perform better on tests of reflective thinking tend to report philosophers’ orthodox answer to this kind of thought experiment. And, if you’ve been following my research, you know that philosophers are particularly reflective thinkers. These correlations may make you wonder about causation. Does thinking reflectively cause people to accept philosophers’ orthodoxy? Or is it the other way around: does studying thought experiments like the broken clock case somehow result in people performing better on reflection tests?

In this episode, I’ll tell you about the experiment I ran to find out. The paper is titled “Reflection-Philosophy Order Effects and Correlations Across Samples” and has been accepted for publication in Analysis. The paper will also mention a bunch of other thought experiments, tests of reflective thinking, and measures of research participants’ data quality.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:51 — 42.4MB)

The Bat And Ball Problem 20 Years Later

In 2002, a chapter from Kahneman and Frederick mentioned “the bat and ball problem”.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

By 2005, Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test paper added the lesser known Widgets and Lily Pad problems. In the intervening 20-ish years, each paper seems to have accrued over 5000 citations.

In 2023, Meyer and Frederick published a massive follow-up paper about the first problem: 59 studies, over 73,000 participants, and more pages of Appendixes than pages in the main article. As someone studying various reflection tests and interventions, I had to take a look right away. In this post, I list five initial takeaways and two things to like about the paper.

Oppenheimer: ‘Philosopher-Scientist-Statesman’

J. Robert Oppenheimer “was widely known not just for his scientific success but for his remarkably wide-ranging knowledge of the humanities [,…] an extraordinary combination…”, says Ashutosh Jogalekar in his 8th and final post about Oppie over at 3 Quarks Daily (2023). Why do I start with this quote? I think it alludes to an important lesson for our time. I explain in less than 700 words below.

Upon Reflection, Ep. 12: Tell Us What You Really Think

I have a question for you: “If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?“. Did 10 cents seem right? The authors of questions like this are attempting to lure you to accept this incorrect answer in order to test whether you thought reflectively when you solved the problem. However, there may be problems with this method of testing reflective thinking. So my colleagues used some underrated methods to determine the degree to which tests like this misclassify correct responses as reflective or lured responses as unreflective. I’ll read the paper in this episode.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:57 — 60.3MB)

Here’s to the Philosopher-Scientists!

Sometimes philosophers complain that scientists do philosophy badly and that philosophers may thereby be underrated. The idea is that people could have better philosophy if they just turned to academic philosophers rather than the popular scientists that have done philosophy badly. (Perhaps analogous complaints about philosophers circulate among scientists). In this post, I want to turn our attention to scientists that do philosophy well and philosophers that do science well.

Upon Reflection, Ep. 11: Testing for Implicit Bias

In this episode, I read my short paper with Morgan Thompson in WIRES Cognitive Science titled, “Testing for Implicit Bias: Values, Psychometrics, and Science Communication“. You may have heard about implicit bias. It is measured by indirect rather than direct measures of bias. We reconstruct arguments from debates about these measures, reveal some instances of talking past one another, highlight how debate has changed, and highlight how the debate is laden with value judgments about psychometrics and science communication. As always, free preprints of my papers are available on my CV under “Publications”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:05 — 42.3MB)

Upon Reflection, Ep. 10: Great Minds Do Not Think Alike

This time I read my 2022 paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology titled, “Great Minds Do Not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences“. As the title suggests, various psychological factors predicted variance in philosophers’ answers to classic philosophical questions. This raises questions about how psychological and demographic differences can explain philosophical differences. There are also implications for scientific psychologists as well as academic philosophers.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:14 — 86.5MB)

Upon Reflection, Ep. 9: Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity

In this episode, I read one of my 2022 articles in Metaphilosophy titled, “Bounded Reflectivism & Epistemic Identity“. Does reflective reasoning help or hinder our judgment? In this paper, I take a middle view between reflectivism and anti-reflectivism that I call bounded reflectivism. The idea is that reflection is a tool that can be used to improve our judgment or for other purposes (such as to defend the beliefs that we consider essential to our identity—a.k.a., our “epistemic identity”).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:55 — 74.9MB)

Upon Reflection, Ep. 8: Reflective Reasoning & Philosophy

On this episode, I read one of my articles from 2021 titled, “Reflective Reasoning and Philosophy” in Philosophy Compass. Both philosophers and cognitive scientists seem to think that philosophical thinking could depend on whether we reason intuitively or reflectively. In this paper, I review the claims, scientific methods, evidence, and what we may need to do to improve our understanding of reflection’s role in philosophical thinking.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:03 — 44.0MB)