Explanation: The Good, The Bad, and The Beautiful
Description
Like scientists, children and adults are often motivated to explain the world around them, including why people behave in particular ways, why objects have some properties rather than others, and why events unfold as they do. Moreover, people have strong and systematic intuitions about what makes something a good (or beautiful) explanation. Why are we so driven to explain? And what accounts for our explanatory preferences? In this talk I’ll present evidence that both children and adults prefer explanations that are simple and have broad scope, consistent with many accounts of explanation from philosophy of science. The good news is that a preference for simple and broad explanations can sometimes improve learning and support effective inferences. The bad news is that under some conditions, these preferences can systematically lead children and adults astray.
Please use the following Zoom link to join the talk: https://mit.zoom.us/j/96755324568
Join us following the talk for our coloquium social hour at the Remo link below:
https://events.mitbcs.info/e/colloquium-reception-04292021
Speaker Bio
Tania Lombrozo is Arthur W. Marks ‘19 Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, conceptual representation, categorization, social cognition, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology. She is the recipient of numerous early-career awards, including the Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation. She has blogged about psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science at Psychology Today and for NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture.
Additional Info
The MIT Colloquium on the Brain and Cognition is a lecture series held weekly during the academic year and features a wide array of speakers from all areas of neuroscience and cognitive science research. The social teas that follow these colloquia bring together students, staff, and faculty to discuss the talk, as well as other research activities within Building 46, at MIT, and around the world. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Colloquia are open to the community, and are held in MIT's Building 46, Room 3002 (Singleton Auditorium) at 4:00PM with a reception to follow.