The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough

Belief in souls is only one component of supernatural thinking in which individuals infer the presence of invisible mechanisms that explain events as paranormal rather than natural. We believe it is important to place greater emphasis on the prevalence of supernatural beliefs across other domains, if only to counter simplistic divisions between rationality and irrationality recently aligned with the contentious science/religion debate

On the adaptive advantage of always being right (even when one is not)

We propose another positive illusion – overconfidence in the generalisability of one’s theory – that fits with McKay & Dennett’s (M&D’s) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children’s developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual

Changing children’s understanding of the brain: a longitudinal study of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures as a measure of public engagement

Demonstrating the impact of public engagement is an increasingly important activity for today’s academics and researchers. The difficulty is that many areas of interest do not lend themselves well to evaluation because the impact of each single intervention can be hard to trace and take time to become manifest. With this in mind, we evaluated a lecture based around the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, ”Meet Your Brain,” delivered to school children from low performing schools. We compared knowledge about four neuroscience facts one week before, one week after and six weeks after the lecture. Analysis revealed significant knowledge transfer one week after the lecture that was retained five weeks later. We conclude that public engagement through tailored lectures can have significant impact in the moderate term with the potential to leave a lasting impression over a longer period

Individualism and the extended-self: cross-cultural differences in the valuation of authentic objects

The current studies examine how valuation of authentic items varies as a function of culture. We find that U.S. respondents value authentic items associated with individual persons (a sweater or an artwork) more than Indian respondents, but that both cultures value authentic objects not associated with persons (a dinosaur bone or a moon rock) equally. These differences cannot be attributed to more general cultural differences in the value assigned to authenticity. Rather, the results support the hypothesis that individualistic cultures place a greater value on objects associated with unique persons and in so doing, offer the first evidence for how valuation of certain authentic items may vary cross-culturally

Do children think that duplicating the body also duplicates the mind?

Philosophers use hypothetical duplication scenarios to explore intuitions about personal identity. Here we examined 5- to 6-year-olds’ intuitions about the physical properties and memories of a live hamster that is apparently duplicated by a machine. In Study 1, children thought that more of the original’s physical properties than episodic memories were present in the duplicate hamster. In Study 2, children thought that episodic memories of the hamster were less likely to duplicate than events captured by a digital camera. Studies 3 and 4 ruled out lower-level explanations of these effects. Study 5 showed that naming the original hamster further reduced the inferred duplication of memories in the second hamster. Taken together, these studies are consistent with the view that young children think that some mental properties are distinct from physical ones

Percentage of responses from secondary students for each question for each survey.

<p>Neurons refers to Question 1, Speed to Question 2, 10% to Question 3 and Memories to Question 4. The blue bars represent the percentage of secondary school children passing each of the questions before the lecture, the red bars represent percentage pass-rates 1-week after the lecture and the green bars represent percentage pass-rates 6 weeks after the lecture. Chance pass-rates are 25% for questions 1, 2 and 4 and 33% for question 3. Significant increases in pass rates occurred on all questions between Times 1 and 2 and between Times 1 and 3. </p

Percentage of correct responses from primary students for each question for each survey.

<p>Neurons refers to Question 1, Speed to Question 2, 10% to Question 3 and Memories to Question 4. The blue bars represent the percentage of primary school children passing each of the questions before the lecture. The red bars represent pass-rates 1-week after the lecture and the green bars represent pass-rates 6 weeks after the lecture. Chance pass-rates are 25% for questions 1, 2 and 4 and 33% for question 3. Significant or approaching significant increases in pass rates occurred on all questions between Times 1 and 2 and between Times 1 and 3. </p