One of life’s most difficult challenges is keeping information a secret, even when well-intentioned. Imagine you need to plan a surprise party for your dad. You send out the invitations, order a cake, and buy the decorations. When you’re talking over these details with your brother, he suddenly looks toward the door. Naturally, you look […]
Automatic Processing
Everyone “has an accent”—even if you think you don’t. Most likely, your accent is influenced by both your cultural identity, socioeconomic status, and other social processes, as well as more cognitive processes like emulating another person’s style in a conversation. Accents are such a strong indicator of social factors that they get associated to stereotypes, […]
This election has been intense, in every sense of the word. At times, some of us might have wished to just shut out the images of angry faces and the sounds of hateful or uninformed utterances. You could have closed your eyes, but you sadly cannot close your ears. It seems clear that this openness […]
Imagine your daily commute. Think about 2+2. Don’t picture pink elephants. These examples illustrate the automaticity of cognition. On highly familiar routes, people habitually and automatically navigate, sometimes taking a familiar route absent-mindedly even when they needed to run an errand some place else. I’d be willing to bet that most people reading this couldn’t […]
One of the most hair-raising thought experiments in philosophy of mind is the philosophical zombie, a being that is physically and behaviorally identical to a normal human, but is not conscious of having any mental states, like the fellow on the right in the figure below. The existence of such a being provides […]